Compared the skill in gender attribution of foreign learners and native speakers of French. Accuracy and fluency of gender attribution by the foreign learners were assessed in spontaneous written production. (Author/VWL)

There is overwhelming evidence that children's first words are primarily nouns even across languages. These data are interpreted as evidence of a "Natural Partitions Theory," one that holds that the concepts referred to by nouns are conceptually more basic than those referred to by verbs or prepositions. Analysis of data from…

A study of the extent to which Spanish and French noun cognates in a 15,000-word corpus have the same or different grammatical gender is presented, and a list of about 750 cognates with differing genders is included. (MSE)

Results indicate that the pattern of acquisition of noun plurals in English is comparable for both children having English as their first language and those acquiring English as a second language. (Authors)

Categorization of lone lexical items from one language embedded in another is often difficult due to their ambiguous status as either loanwords or codeswitches. Following variationist principles, a comparative method is used to disambiguate lone English-origin nouns in Acadian-French discourse. (Author/VWL)

Three studies examined adults' generic noun phrases in English and Mandarin Chinese from child-directed speech of caregivers interacting with their toddlers. Found that generic noun phrases were reliably identified in both languages. Generic noun phrases most frequently referred to animals. Non-generic noun phrases were used most frequently for…

Discusses the advantages and disadvantages of what has become the standard approach to teaching relative clauses. To overcome the disadvantages, proposes a hierarchical teaching method that begins by introducing noun phrases that contain relative clauses before comparing them with similar structures in the learner's first language. Shows an…

The influence of syllabic structure, lexical class and stress patterns of known words on the acquisition of the English stress system was investigated in ten native Thai speakers. All participants were adult learners of English with an average length of residence in the US of 1.4 years. They were asked to produce and give perceptual judgments on…

Research supported by grants from the National Institute of Health and the National Institute of Mental Health. (DD)

Investigates structural and pragmatic aspects of caregiver input in English and Korean that relate to the early development of nouns and verbs. Twenty mothers in each language were asked to interact with their children in two contexts: Book-reading and toy-play. Data suggest that systematic comparisons of caregiver input within and across…

In a study of very young children's pronunciation of nouns and verbs, ten children aged 20 to 25 months were exposed to experimental nouns and verbs, which had not yet been comprehended or produced by the children. Each of the objects and actions was given an experimental name based on phonemes in the children's speech. These objects and actions…

A study of the cognitive processes involved in achieving coherence in discourse examined a major factor affecting the accessibility of referents: the length of absence of the referent from the distribution of different types of grammatical referential devices (definite nouns and anaphoric pronouns) in discourse. Six versions of a set of twenty…

This article, written in Russian, propounds the application of the contrastive method in teaching the morphology of Russian to English-speaking students. The presentation is based on categorization by parts of speech. Included here is a comparative analysis of nouns (gender, number, case, expression of definite and indefinite articles),…

Discusses the differences between the English native and nonnative speaker's creation and use of nominal compounds. A comparison between English speakers and Japanese native speakers indicates that not only must nonnative speakers acquire rules in order to effectively compound words in English, but that rules must indeed exist, indicating that…

Two experiments examined differences in the early noun learning of English- and Japanese-speaking children. Found that English-speaking children's vocabularies were heavily lopsided with many more object than animal names, whereas Japanese-speaking children's vocabularies were more evenly balanced. Results suggested that early learners of English…