Uses psuedo-verbs to investigate the relationship between children's awareness of grammatical distinctions and their success in learning about the spelling sequence for morphemes that do not conform to letter-sound correspondence rules. Concludes that the use of "ed" endings for regular verbs reflects a morphological spelling strategy…

Sixty learning disabled children and 60 children in regular classes (both groups' ages six to nine years) were given a tense marker test to elicit future, present, and past tense markers for 50 verbs organized into ten categories based on the operation required to form the past tense. (Author/PHR)

This study investigated the rate at which 60 elementary school children produced 3 advanced verb forms--past progressive, past perfect progressive, and past perfect--when retelling narratives. Results suggest that advanced verb production is influenced by children's sensitivity to type of narrative register, the propositional ability associated…

Presents an investigation of a longitudinal study of the development of past tense and plural inflections in elementary school children enrolled in either a French immersion or a traditional English curriculum. The type of program did not influence the rate of acquisition. (Author/BK)

Twenty-six children (ages 11-13) with spelling deficits, 31 younger spelling-level-matched children, and 31 age-matched children were asked to spell verbs with past tense and progressive markers in dictated sentences and list form. Children with spelling deficits had significant difficulty with inflections as well as spelling inflections and base…

Tested the cross-linguistic applicability of the dual mechanism model, investigating children's spontaneous performance with past definite and elicited performance with past definite and past participle. Performance profiles with productive and unproductive inflections could not be categorically distinguished. Phonologically transparent…

A study investigated children's understanding (3-, 6-, 9-, and 12-year-olds) of the different levels of meaning of the cognitive verb "know" as defined by the abstractness and conceptual difficulty hierarchy of W. S. Hall, E. K. Scholnick, and A. T. Hughes. Results indicated that cognitive verb knowledge increased with development and…

A study with 56 sixth graders performing verb-recognition tests with pretests and posttests indicated that feedback greatly facilitated improved posttest performance and increased near-transfer performance as well. Both self-generated and traditional feedback resulted in improved performance. (SLD)

The language transcripts of seven children with Down syndrome (DS) and seven typically developing children with comparable mean length of utterance levels were compared for verb argument structure. Findings suggest that syntactic difficulties may delay children with DS in overcoming the optional subject phenomena and the lesser number of anomalous…

Presents the results of a study that explored the management of subject-verb agreement in second -to seventh-grade children studying the French language. Examined whether agreement with imperfect tense may have a lesser cost than agreement with the present. Finds that imperfect tense is acquired more rapidly than present tense. (CMK)

This case study evaluated the usefulness of compact language drills (CLDs) with a 12-year-old deaf child to improve his ability to use four irregular verbs. Results indicated that the daily five-minute drills requiring immediate recall of irregular verb forms significantly improved the child's ability to use the verbs correctly both immediately…

Compares the lexical proficiency of 69 grade 6 immersion students with that of 22 native French-speaking peers, based on verb use and in 5 written compositions. Measures of lexical error, variety, specificity, and sophistication show clear differences between the two groups. (33 references) (Author/VWL)

Production of the deictic verbs "bring" and "take" was evaluated among 88 normally functioning elementary school children. Results showed that data evaluation procedures greatly influenced conclusions, the second-to-emerge form was easier to learn in a conventional way, and the second term was the proactive stimulus for…

A study assessed whether two children (ages 4-6) with autism could be taught a child-initiated query as a pivotal response to facilitate the use of grammatical morphemes. Children learned the strategy and acquired and generalized the targeted morpheme. Children also showed increases in mean length of utterance and verb acquisition. (Contains…

Comparison of Chinese, Malay, and Tamil primary school students' responses to a test featuring 19 error types related to English verb structure revealed no significant differences between the three groups' selection of developmental errors. The test also showed promise in measuring students' English accuracy as opposed to fluency. (CB)