Illusions of grammaticality have often been used to probe the properties of the human sentence processor in syntactic activities like subject--verb agreement, reflexive binding, and negative polarity item (NPI) licensing. Originally, NPI licensing in processing was thought to be a product of cue-based retrieval. Mounting evidence that the NPI…

Proficient reading requires the ability to analyze words for various properties, including pronunciation, meaning, and syntactical function. However, most instruction in word analysis is limited to phonics instruction provided in the early elementary grades. For older students, whose words largely center units of meaning, or morphemes, early…

African American Vernacular English (AAVE) is a distinct variety of English that exhibits unique phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics. However, the focus of this study was on the grammatical aspects of AAVE. The objectives were to identify and analyze the predominant grammatical features of AAVE employed by Justin Bieber in his songs from…

When acquiring the English plural, children correctly produce plural words long before they develop an understanding of morphological structure. When acquiring Sesotho noun prefixes, children are aware of the multiple constraints governing variation from a young age. Both of these cases raise questions about the Shin and Miller (2022) account of…

Purpose: We examined the properties of mean length of utterance (MLU) in Czech, a morphologically complex Slavic language. We compared the scores of MLU calculated in different units and based on different sample lengths and assessed its validity against another transcript and test-based measures. Method: One hundred nine children were recorded…

Background: Speech and language are interconnected systems, and language disorder often co-occurs with childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) and non-CAS speech sound disorders (SSDs). Potential trade-off effects between speech and language in connected speech in children without overt language disorder have been less explored. Method: Story retell…

Background: We examined linguistic features in fourth graders' narrative and opinion writing and their relations to writing quality. We analysed narrative and opinion essays in terms of lexical sophistication and diversity as well as syntactic complexity, syntactic accuracy, and morphological complexity. Methods: Data were from English-speaking…

Background: We examined linguistic features in fourth graders' narrative and opinion writing and their relations to writing quality. We analysed narrative and opinion essays in terms of lexical sophistication and diversity as well as syntactic complexity, syntactic accuracy, and morphological complexity. Methods: Data were from English-speaking…

The current study examined early grammatical marking in a relatively understudied language, Mandarin, by using the Mandarin version of MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory. Two waves of data collection included 338 monolingual children (17-36 months; 143 female) at Time 1 and 308 children (32-55 months; 139 female) at Time 2 and…

All accounts of language acquisition agree that, by around age 4, children's knowledge of grammatical constructions is abstract, rather than tied solely to individual lexical items. The aim of the present research was to investigate, focusing on the passive, whether children's and adults' performance is additionally semantically constrained,…

Grammatical awareness of syntax and morphology is important in children's literacy development for both reading and writing. Hebrew, a language with rich inflectional morphology, marks nouns for plural number in conjunction with gender. Hebrew attributive adjectives agree with noun number and gender in the same noun phrase, while predicative…

Inaudible syntactic markers are especially difficult to spell. This paper examines how 455 fourth graders spell silent French plural markers in a dictation with real and pseudowords after one year of formal French instruction (L2). The Generalized Linear Mixed Model analysis shows first that noun plural spelling (real and pseudo) is a strong…

Each language has its unique way to mark grammatical information such as gender, number and tense. For example, English marks number and tense/aspect information with morphological suffixes (e.g., -"s" or -"ed"). These morphological suffixes are crucial for language acquisition as they are the basic building blocks of syntax,…

This study is based on naturalistic speech samples produced by one child learning Cree as her first language (2;01-4;03) and presents the first investigation into the development of preverbs in the language. Preverbs are an optional class of morpheme which precede the lexical verb stem, dividing into grammatical, lexical and directional (deictic)…

This paper takes issue with the view of conceptual structures as autonomous syntactic structures generated by syntactic formation rules. Instead, it adopts the position developed by Croft and Cruse (2004), in showing that linguistic knowledge -- knowledge of meaning and form -- is basically conceptual structure. In fact the, fundamental problem…