This study examined Korean English as a foreign language (EFL) learners' ability to establish textual cohesion in English through appropriate selection of reference forms and reference management strategies in their written narrative discourse. It employed both quantitative and qualitative analysis to explore how the language-specific reference…

Children as young as two use sentence structure to learn the meanings of verbs. We probed the generality of sensitivity to sentence structure by moving to a different semantic and syntactic domain, spatial prepositions. Twenty-six-month-olds used sentence structure to determine whether a new word was an object-category name ("This is a corp!") or…

Cross-linguistic borrowing (overt use of words from the other language) and transfer (use of semantic or syntactic structures from the other language without active switching to that language) were examined during language production in Russian-English bilinguals. Grammatical category (noun/verb) and level of concreteness were found to influence…

In 4 experiments, we examined 16- and 20-month-old infants' understanding of proper names and count nouns. In each experiment, infants were taught a novel word modeled linguistically as either a proper name (e.g., "DAXY") or a count noun (e.g., "a DAXY") for a stuffed animal shown on a puppet stage. This animal was moved to a new location on the…

Examined linguistic and nonlinguistic context effects on the shape bias in three year olds' word learning. Results indicated that children systematically attended to shape in interpreting novel count nouns, but their interpretation of adjectives was contextually determined. (GLR)

Examines (1) preschool children's production of multiple, hierarchically related labels; (2) the pragmatic consequences of the inherent asymmetry of inclusion relations; and (3) the influence of morphology (modifier plus noun constructions vs. simple lexemes) at the subordinate level. Performance shows an inability to label objects flexibly at…

In 2 experiments, 15- and 21-month-old infants were presented with a target object and asked to select an object taxonomically or thematically related to the target object. The target object was introduced with or without a novel nonsense noun. Results indicated that novel nouns focused infants' attention on taxonomic relations. (MDM)

Investigates acquisition of noun-drop in Spanish. Indicates that rich agreement morphology is not a sufficient condition for noun-drop. Supports a model of the human language faculty in which points of syntactic variation are not fully reducible to the overt inflectional and declensional morphology. (Author/VWL)

Effects of negative input for 13 categories of grammatical error were assessed in a longitudinal study of naturalistic adult-child discourse. Two-hour samples of conversational interaction were obtained at two points in time, separated by a lag of 12 weeks, for 12 children (mean age 2;0 at the start). The data were interpreted within the framework…

Findings from a longitudinal study of bilingual children acquiring Cantonese and English pose a challenge to the noun phrase accessibility hierarchy (NPAH; Keenan & Comrie, 1977), which predicts that object relatives should not be acquired before subject relatives. In the children's Cantonese, object relatives emerged earlier than or…

Children at four age levels (4,6,8, and 10 years) were given continuous recognition tasks using concrete noun, abstract noun, and pictorial stimuli in a 4 x 3 factorial design. Recognition for both concrete and abstract nouns was found to be linear and increasing significantly with age, but no age trends for picture recognition were found.…

The acquisition of verb meaning is discussed and compared with the acquisition of simple noun meaning. Evidence presented from three experiments with children and adults indicates that (1) verbal meanings are relatively slow to be acquired; (2) the acquisition of verb meaning involves the gradual addition of semantic components; and (3) verbs are…

The spontaneous speech of two Zulu girls was monitored for use of nominals. The data for one girl, 23 months, are reported in detail. Analysis of prefixed and prefixless nouns in isolated citation forms and in syntactic construction revealed that the child perceived the internal structure of nouns before the age of two, although the prefix often…

Investigates the ability of 32 two-year-old children to use syntactic (i.e., form class) and semantic (i.e., type of referent) information to interpret the meaning of new nouns. Subjects were taught either a common noun or a proper noun for a block-like or animal-like object and then asked to select the named toy. (Author/CB)

The acquisition of noun gender on articles was studied in a sample of 21 young German-speaking children. Longitudinal spontaneous speech data were used. Data analysis is based on 22 two-hourly speech samples per child from 6 children between 1 ; 4 and 3 ; 8 and on 5 two-hourly speech samples per child from 15 children between 1 ; 4 and 2 ; 10. The…