This dissertation examines whether and how psycholinguistic priming, and social knowledge are integrated in the identification of sociolinguistic variants. Using the English variable (ING), the alternation between -ing and -in' (e.g. thinking vs. thinkin') as a testing ground, this dissertation probes whether and how individuals utilize…

A number of studies in different languages have shown that speakers may be sensitive to the presence of inflectional morphology in the absence of verb meaning (Caramazza et al. in Cognition 28(3):297-332, 1988; Clahsen in Behav Brain Sci 22(06):991-1013, 1999; Post et al. in Cognition 109(1):1-17, 2008). In this study, sensitivity to inflectional…

This paper explores the hypothesis that children pay more attention to phonological cues than semantic cues when acquiring grammatical patterns. In a series of artificial allomorphy learning experiments with adults and children we find support for this hypothesis but only for those learners who do not show clear signs of explicit learning. In…

Learning to mark for tense in a second language is notoriously difficult for speakers of a tenseless language like Chinese. In this study we test two reasons for these difficulties in Chinese-English sequential bilingual children: (1) morphophonological transfer (i.e., avoidance of complex codas), and (2) interpretation of -"ed" as an…

English-speaking children use plural morphology from around the age of 2, yet often omit the syllabic plural allomorph /-[schwa]z/ until age 5 (e.g., "bus(es)"). It is not clear if this protracted acquisition is due to articulatory difficulties, low input frequency, or fricative-final words (e.g., "bus," "nose") being…

Afrikaans is a West Germanic language that originated in South Africa as a descendent of Dutch. It displays discontinuous sentential negation (SN), where negation is expressed by two phonologically identical negative particles that appear in two different positions in the sentence. The negation system is argued to be an innovation that came about…

The acquisition of a new morphological rule can be influenced by numerous factors, including the type of feedback provided during learning. The present study aimed to test the effect of different feedback types on children's ability to learn and generalize an artificial morphological rule (AMR). Two groups of eight-year-olds learned to judge and…

We examined the unique contributions of prosodic awareness and morphological awareness to school-aged children's word reading and reading comprehension. A total of 110 elementary-age children from Grades 4 and 5 participated in the current study. To measure prosodic awareness, children were asked to listen to and reflect on the stress patterns of…

Beginning with the classic work of Shepard, Hovland, & Jenkins (1961), Type II visual patterns (e.g., exemplars are large white squares OR small black triangles) have held a special place in investigations of human learning. Recent research on Type II "linguistic" patterns has shown that they are relatively frequent across languages…

The goal of this article is to make the case for a radical exemplar account of child language acquisition, under which unwitnessed forms are produced and comprehended by on-the-fly analogy across multiple stored exemplars, weighted by their degree of similarity to the target with regard to the task at hand. Across the domains of (1) word meanings,…

Background: Middle school students use the information conveyed by morphemes (i.e., units of meaning such as prefixes, root words and suffixes) in different ways to support their literacy endeavours, suggesting the likelihood that morphological knowledge is multidimensional. This has important implications for assessment. Methods: The current…

Background: Middle school students use the information conveyed by morphemes (i.e., units of meaning such as prefixes, root words and suffixes) in different ways to support their literacy endeavours, suggesting the likelihood that morphological knowledge is multidimensional. This has important implications for assessment. Methods: The current…

Intervention with children with speech and language difficulties has been proven beneficial compared with no treatment yet, knowing what type of intervention to provide remains a challenge. Studies of English-speaking children indicate that intervention targeting the production of morphological targets may have a positive effect on phonological…

Purpose: When learning novel word forms, preschoolers with developmental language disorder (DLD; also known as "specific language impairment") produce speech targets inaccurately and with a high degree of intraword variability. The aim of the current study is to specify whether and how layering lexical-semantic information onto novel…

The morphological structure of the word has a central function in the organization of the mental lexicon and word recognition. Polymorphemic words in Arabic are composed of two non-concatenated morphemes: root and word-pattern. This study is the first to address the issue of nominal-pattern priming among young developing Arabic speakers. I…