Evidentials are grammatical elements such as affixes and particles indicating the source of knowledge. We provide an overview of this grammatical category and consider three research domains to which developmental studies on evidentiality contribute: the acquisition of linguistic means to characterize knowledge, the conceptual understanding of…

"Constructions" are the central unit of grammatical analysis in cognitive linguistics. In formal linguistics "construction" referred to forms that were projected from lexical items rather than from an autonomous syntax. Thus, an expression, "I danced the night away" requires an intransitive verb in a transitive construction provided "away" is…

An enhanced replication of an original quasi-experiment (Tom Bellomo, 2009b) was conducted to quantify the extent of long term retention of word parts and vocabulary. Such were introduced as part of a vocabulary acquisition strategy in a developmental reading course at one southeast four-year college. Aside from incorporating changes to the test…

The standard task used to study inflectional processing of verbs involves presentation of the stem form from which the participant is asked to generate the past tense. This task reveals a processing disadvantage for irregular relative to regular English verbs, more pronounced for lower-frequency items. Dual- and single-mechanism theories of…

The article shows how mind-mapping software can be used to help premedical students learn, apply and relate terminology sharing Greek and Latin roots. Mind-mapping software use a center, branches, and sub-branches to show connections between Greek and Latin roots generated on the mind map. Instruction with the mind-mapping software goes through…

The learning of English tenses and verbs is obviously the major and challenging part of second language learning and acquisition for Chinese students. The paper analyzes the features of simple present tense, simple past tense and verbs in them from the aspect of Sidney Greenbaum and Randolph Quirk's student grammar book as an instructive example.…

Korean writing is a syllabary where spaces occur between phrases rather than between words. This characteristic of Korean allows different types of information in Korean sentences to be dissociated in ways that are not possible in the languages that have been the focus of most psycholinguistic research, thereby providing new opportunities to…

It is important for special educators to have a strong repertoire of diagnostic methods to determine how well students with high-incidence disabilities are accessing, reading, and remembering content from textbooks used in their middle and high school classes. Suggestions for using the diagnostic information to guide specialized instruction…

Vocabulary instruction is addressed on two levels in this article: 1) the importance of direct teaching and 2) using the books of a popular children's series as examples to support these vocabulary lessons. Also addressed are specific methods of turning classrooms into places where vocabulary instruction is effective and enjoyable. Elements of…

In this paper, I examine the prosodic nature of unstressed function words in Spanish. I defend the hypothesis that these words, like all other words in the language, have a syllable that is lexically designated as stressed. I suggest that the essential property of these words is that they are subject to a rule of prosodic merger with following…

Two recent papers (de Villiers & Johnson, 2007; Johnson, de Villiers & Seymour, 2005) have claimed that children have difficulty with verbal "-s" until five- six-years-old. This contrasts with perceptual studies showing evidence for sensitivity to the grammatical properties of verbal "-s" as young as 1;4. These apparently conflicting findings can…

Noun-class prefixes are obligatory in most Bantu languages. However, the Sotho languages (Sesotho, Setswana, Sepedi) permit a subset of prefixes to be realized as null at the intersection of "unmarked" phonological, syntactic, and discourse conditions. This raises the question of how and when the licensing of null prefixes is learned. Using…

In this paper we propose a method for characterizing development in large longitudinal corpora. The method has the following three features: (i) it suggests how to represent development without assuming predefined stages; (ii) it includes caregiver speech/child-directed speech; (iii) it uses statistical association measures for investigating…

This resource is a compilation of three documents that support the teaching of spelling in today's schools: a discussion of "Why Spelling Instruction Matters", a checklist for evaluating a spelling program, and tables of Common Core State Standards that are linked to spelling instruction. "Why Spelling Instruction Matters"…

Limited vocabulary knowledge has been cited as a key factor in the literacy achievement gap, particularly for students with learning disabilities, students of color, and English-language learners. Recent authorities have recommended multipronged approaches to assist vocabulary growth in classrooms. In addition, authorities have called for…