Paper read at the 46th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, December 29, 1971, St. Louis, Missouri. (VM)

How do English-speaking children inflect nouns for plurality and verbs for the past tense? We assess theoretical answers to this question by considering errors of omission, which occur when children produce a stem in place of its inflected counterpart (e.g., saying "dress" to refer to 5 dresses). A total of 307 children (aged 3;11-9;9)…

Alaska, with its history of Russian colonization, has a large stock of Russian loanwords. The majority of the loanwords discussed are for cultural and concrete items and are substances, emerging as noun words, to which paragogic endings are agglutinated. (NCR)

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) and their normally developing (ND) peers imitated proper nouns, the pronouns "he" and "you," and the article "the" in subject phrases. Both groups showed significantly more omissions of the function words than the proper nouns. A phonological explanation of subject article and pronoun omission is…

Proposals for foot structure in Japanese have been limited to versification and to mechanisms for assigning tone that bear little resemblance to stress feet. It is argued that a bimoraic foot whose properties are similar to those of stress feet in other languages plays a significant role in Japanese morphophonology. (35 references) (JL)

Children tend to choose an entity they cannot already label, rather than one they can, as the likely referent of a novel noun. The effect of input that contradicts this strategy on the interpretation of other novel nouns was investigated. In pre- and posttests, 4-year-olds were asked to judge whether novel nouns referred to "name-similar" familiar…

This study investigates whether or not the representation of lexical stress information can be primed during speech production. In four experiments, we attempted to prime the stress position of bisyllabic target nouns (picture names) having initial and final stress with auditory prime words having either the same or different stress as the target…

In 2 picture-naming and 2 grammaticality judgment experiments, the authors explored how the phonological form of a word, especially its termination, affects gender processing by monolinguals and unbalanced bilinguals speaking German. The results of the 2 experiments with native German speakers yielded no significant differences: The reaction times…

Spanish and English have exocentric verb+object = subject/instrument compounds, such as "abrelatas" (opens-cans) "can-opener" and "scarecrow." They share a general constructional pattern, consist of "clumps" or subfamilies of forms, and have a negative or jocular tendency. They differ in their individual…

Third- and sixth-grade readers were asked to label sets of pictures printed with distracting words (either nouns, adjectives, or functors) and nonsense syllables. (Author/JMB)

A study of tonic placement in various types of English noun phrases used as elements of clause structure. The notion of nominal compound is broadened; reflection of grammatical relationships by stress and tendencies concerning tonic placement in noun phrases as these are related to the Headword are noted. (AMH)

The experimental results reported here indicate that sentences are remembered and recalled in terms of semantic representations of the indicated words or concepts rather than in terms of phonological representations. (FB)