The purpose of this eight week study was to provide explicit instruction to improve spelling to 124 sixth grade students who are speakers of African American English (AAE). Two classroom teachers taught 14 different language arts class sections. The research design was a pretest/posttest/posttest design using wait-list-control. The treatment group…

Malay (Rumi) is alphabetic and has a transparent, agglutinative system of affixation. We manipulated language-specific junctural phonetics in Malay and English to investigate whether morphophonemic L1-knowledge influences L2-processing. A morpheme decision task, "Does this "nonword" sound like a mono- or bi-morphemic English word?", was developed…

Linguists generally acknowledge that there exists an inevitable inter-relationship between different levels of linguistic analysis--phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics. Various linguistic labels are used to describe such a link. In particular, there exists a bridge between the phonology and morphology of particular languages.…

Background: Children with language impairment often exhibit significant difficulty in the use of grammatical morphology. Although English-speaking children with language impairment have special difficulties with verb morphology, noun morphology can also be problematic in languages of a different typology. Aims: Hungarian is an agglutinating…

The purpose of the present research is to examine which of the two factors: (1) the iconic-semiotic factor; or (2) the human-phonetic factor is more relevant in explaining the appearance and distribution of the hand shape B-bent in Israeli Sign Language (ISL). The B-bent shape has been the subject of much attention in sign language research…

Suggests that many kinds of aphasic errors demonstrate what slips-of-the-tongue do, and that the study of aphasia can shed light on normal language processes. (Author/BK)

Purpose: The purpose of this experiment was to determine if nonreferential morphophonological information was sufficient to facilitate the learning of gender subcategories (i.e., masculine vs. feminine) in individuals with normal language (NL) and those with a history of language-based learning disabilities (HLD). Method: Thirty-two adults…

A series of experiments employing an agreement-error elicitation task allowed the examination of the effects of variations in notional, lexical, and morphophonological features on the implementation of agreement between subject and verb in English. Results show that lexical number seems to dominate verb agreement. (64 references) (CP)

The articles in this report explore the status and progress of studies on the nature of speech, instrumentation for its investigation, and practical research applications. Titles of the papers and their authors are as follows: (1) "Phonological Awareness: The Role of the Reading Experience" (Virginia A. Mann); (2) "An Investigation of Speech…

The phonemic effects of word length, consonant-vowel structure, syllable structure, and meaning on word segmentation were investigated in two experiments with young children. The decentration hypothesis, which predicts that children who habitually direct their attention to word meaning would concentrate better at analyzing a spoken form without…

Describes two experiments which explored the possibility that young adults who differ in spelling ability also differ in sensitivity to morphophonemic structure and word formation principles that underlie the regularities of English spelling. Results show that poor spellers were less able than good spellers to exploit regularities at the surface…

Discusses the "g" found in first person singular present indicative forms of 14 Spanish verbs. Provides an integrated discussion of the structure and evolution of these verbs with regard to (1) morphological status of "g"; (2) reason for and nature of its extension; and (3) shared attributes of affected verbs. (Author/LMO)

How do we produce the past tenses of verbs? For the last 20 years this question has been the focal domain for conflicting theories of language, knowledge representation, and cognitive processing. On one side of the debate have been similarity-based or single-route approaches that propose that all past tenses are formed simply through phonological…

In fast speech, certain segments pronounced in careful speech may be deleted. Rules of a generative phonology have been used to account for fast speech forms. An alternative approach is suggested which views fast speech deletions as merely limiting cases of segment reduction, under conditions of increased tempo and/or casualness. To complement…

This paper argues that a domain-based approach can be used to explain the complex tonal structure of Xhosa nouns by means of a single H tone spread rule. The argument proposes an H tone-motivated domain structure for every noun type, referred to as Tone Domains (TDs), with the number of TDs determined by the number of lexical H tones in a given…