Purpose: In this reply, we respond to comments on our article "Tracking the Growth of Tense and Agreement in Children With Specific Language Impairment: Differences Between Measures of Accuracy, Diversity, and Productivity." Conclusion: The finite verb morphology composite can be disproportionately affected by frequently occurring…

We present a neural network model of learning and processing the English past tense that is based on the notion that experience-dependent cortical development is a core aspect of cognitive development. During learning the model adds and removes units and connections to develop a task-specific final architecture. The model provides an integrated…

Educationese, the language often spoken, written and understood only by educators, is in grave danger. Anti-educationese radicals recently proposed national legislation outlawing the passive voice in all education communications, even school district newsletters. These revolutionaries purport that the use of shorter sentences, simple vocabulary…

This article presents the authors' comments on Nina Hyams' article, "The Acquisition of Inflection: A Parameter Setting Approach" (AIPSA). The article began as a 1986 presentation at the Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD). Parts of it were also presented at the 4th Eastern States Conference on Linguistics (ESCOL) in 1987…

Studies of copular forms are extremely relevant to issues in philosophy, psychology, and linguistics. Psychologists have recently argued that the most distinctive aspect of human language is its combinatorial nature (e.g., Gentner, 2003; Spelke, 2003). They argue that this linguistic component might be what separates human from animal cognition.…

Lardiere (2003), in her reply to Lakshmanan and Selinker (2001), justifies the use of suppliance in obligatory contexts as a method of analysis in the investigation of the second language (L2) acquisition of past tense, and claims that such a method is characteristic of previous studies that have proposed the Aspect Hypothesis. It is argued here…

Examines the patterns of word formation as found in written English and written Chinese, contrasting the role of compounding, derivation, inflection, and word length as they relate to noun formation. Implications are drawn for the translator. (AM)