This paper explores the hypothesis that children pay more attention to phonological cues than semantic cues when acquiring grammatical patterns. In a series of artificial allomorphy learning experiments with adults and children we find support for this hypothesis but only for those learners who do not show clear signs of explicit learning. In…

A nonrandomized quasi-experimental, mixed-method double pretest-posttest design was used to compare the effects of a multilinguistic word study model of instruction -- RAVE-O program (Wolf, Miller, & Donnelly, 2000) -- in comparison with a phonics word study model of instruction -- Fountas and Pinnell Phonics Lessons -- Letters, words, and how…

The main goal of this tutorial is to promote the study of children with developmental language disorder (DLD) across different languages of the world. The cumulative effect of these efforts is likely to be a set of more compelling and comprehensive theories of language learning difficulties and, possibly, of language acquisition in general.…

Afrikaans is a West Germanic language that originated in South Africa as a descendent of Dutch. It displays discontinuous sentential negation (SN), where negation is expressed by two phonologically identical negative particles that appear in two different positions in the sentence. The negation system is argued to be an innovation that came about…

Background: Turkish has a rich system of noun suffixes, and although its complex suffixation system may seem daunting, it can actually present a learning opportunity for children. Despite its unique features, Turkish has not been studied extensively, especially in the case of children with language deficits, such as developmental language disorder…

Purpose: This clinical focus article provides readers with a description of the stimulus characteristics of 12 popular tests of speech sound production. Method: Using significance testing and descriptive analyses, stimulus items were compared in terms of the number of opportunities for production of all consonant singletons, clusters, and rhotic…

The acquisition of a new morphological rule can be influenced by numerous factors, including the type of feedback provided during learning. The present study aimed to test the effect of different feedback types on children's ability to learn and generalize an artificial morphological rule (AMR). Two groups of eight-year-olds learned to judge and…

Beginning with the classic work of Shepard, Hovland, & Jenkins (1961), Type II visual patterns (e.g., exemplars are large white squares OR small black triangles) have held a special place in investigations of human learning. Recent research on Type II "linguistic" patterns has shown that they are relatively frequent across languages…

The goal of this article is to make the case for a radical exemplar account of child language acquisition, under which unwitnessed forms are produced and comprehended by on-the-fly analogy across multiple stored exemplars, weighted by their degree of similarity to the target with regard to the task at hand. Across the domains of (1) word meanings,…

Intervention with children with speech and language difficulties has been proven beneficial compared with no treatment yet, knowing what type of intervention to provide remains a challenge. Studies of English-speaking children indicate that intervention targeting the production of morphological targets may have a positive effect on phonological…

Purpose: The aim of this article was to explore how the type of allomorph (e.g., past tense buzz[ d ] vs. nod[ ?d ]) influences the ability to perceive and produce grammatical morphemes in children with typical development and with specific language impairment (SLI). Method: The participants were monolingual Australian English--speaking children.…

The morphological structure of the word has a central function in the organization of the mental lexicon and word recognition. Polymorphemic words in Arabic are composed of two non-concatenated morphemes: root and word-pattern. This study is the first to address the issue of nominal-pattern priming among young developing Arabic speakers. I…

This research discussed education and dialectology, examining the relation of Orang Rimba (OR) isolect in three places at Jambi Province. Different levels of education in each group of OR also influence language maintenance at proto-language. Language shift will occur when OR communicate with the villagers. The number of OR children who go to…

Background: German participles are formed by a co-occurrence of prefixation and suffixation. While the acquisition of regular and irregular suffixation has been investigated exhaustively, it is still unclear how German children master the prosodically determined prefixation rule (prefix "ge-"). Findings reported in the literature are…

The study explored the inflectional morphological awareness of Greek-speaking children with dyslexia in grade 3. The sample consisted of 24 dyslexic children and 32 chronological age-matched typically developing readers. All participants completed two oral experimental tasks of inflectional morphological awareness (i.e., verb inflections and…