One strategy that children might use to sort words into grammatical categories such as noun and verb is distributional bootstrapping, in which local co-occurrence information is used to distinguish between categories. Words that can be used in more than one grammatical category could be problematic for this approach. Using naturalistic corpus…

In order to study problems of individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) with morphosyntax, we investigated twenty high-functioning Greek-speaking children (mean age: 6;11) and twenty age- and language-matched typically developing children on environments that allow or forbid object clitics or their corresponding noun phrase. Children with…

The study examined linguistic flexibility of Hebrew-speaking students from middle childhood to adolescence compared with adults on tasks requiring them to alternate between different versions of varied linguistic stimuli. Lexical flexibility was tested by constructing different words with a shared root and a shared prosodic template;…

Prior studies of ambiguity resolution in young children have found that children rely heavily on lexical information but persistently fail to use referential constraints in online parsing [Trueswell, J.C., Sekerina, I., Hill, N.M., & Logrip, M.L, (1999). The kindergarten-path effect: Studying on-line sentence processing in young children.…

An experiment was conducted to gain insight into the demarcative function of stress and intonation by testing the effectiveness of these features in resolving structural ambiguity. The responses of native speakers were analyzed both in the production and in the recognition of 68 pairs of potentially ambiguous sentences. Special care was taken to…

This paper argues that the hypothesis that all languages have a definitization process is empirically refutable, and that use of the terminology "definite" and "indefinite" is justified in that it reflects intuitions of grammarians and linguists. The following statements are tested against evidence from samples of different languages: (1) all noun…

This report presents a contrastive analysis of the phonological and grammatical systems of English and Polish. The analysis is intended as a resource in teaching Polish to speakers of English. Consequently, areas of special difficulty for the English-speaking learner are stressed: the phonology of segmental phonemes, the morphology of nouns, noun…

This book describes the phonological and grammatical structure of the whole-Dravidian language family from different aspects, examining its history and writing system, structure and typology, lexicon, and recent contacts between Dravidian and other language groups. The 11 chapters highlight the following: (1) "Introduction" (e.g., the…

This study examines the ten major contemporary standard Slavic languages (Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, Bielorussian, Czech, Slovak, Serbo-Croatian, Macedonian, Slovenian, and Bulgarian) from the point of view of their similarities and differences in morpho-syntactic structure. Areas examined include: vowel and consonant systems, morphophonemics,…

The collection of papers on linguistic experiments includes: "Discourse Functions of Pitch Range in Spontaneous and Read Speech" (Gayle M. Ayers); "When Is a Syllable Not a Syllable?" (Mary E. Beckman); "The Relationship between Syntactic and Semantic Processes in Sentence Comprehension" (Julie E. Boland); "The Influence of Orthography and…

This is a contrastive analysis of English and Modern Literary Arabic. Part one deals with phonology, including suprasegmentals and orthography. Part two deals with morphology, part three with sentence structure, part four with verb phrases, and part five with noun phrases. These sections emphasize structures that present problems to the…

This analysis of Ibo is not intended as a definitive work, but rather represents a novel approach to the description of the phonology and grammar of this language. The analysis is organized under the following headings: (1) "Sounds"; (2) "Tones"; (3) "Words Beginning in a Consonant"; (4) "Plurals"; (5) "Possessives"; (6) "As To"; (7) "Numerals";…

This contrastive analysis of English and Thai is designed to introduce ESL teachers to many of the differences between Thai and English. The material is intended to assist the teacher in defining the problems that Thai speakers are likely to have in learning English. The introduction includes background information on Thailand and its people. Part…

This contrastive analysis of English and Mandarin Chinese is designed to introduce ESL teachers to many of the fundamental differences between Chinese and English. This material is intended to assist the teacher in defining the problems that Chinese speakers are likely to have in learning English. The introduction includes information on the…

The manual concentrates on features of English and Indochinese which are dissimilar and, therefore, potential problem areas. These areas were identified through: (1) a contrastive analysis of English and Indochinese (Lao, Cambodian, Vietnamese) phonology, morphology, and syntax; (2) an analysis of Indochinese students' errors; and (3) noting the…