Three studies assessing language comprehension of infants and toddlers through a method requiring a minimum of motor movement, no speech production, and differential visual fixation of two simultaneously presented video events provide insight into children's emerging linguistic capabilities and help resolve controversies about language production…

The use of generic "the" and its alternatives "0" and "a(n)" is investigated at a range of discourse levels in a series of articles from "Scientific American." Generic "the" was found to occur less frequently than generic "0" but much more frequently than generic "a(n)." (Author/LMO)

Examines the theory of empty categories in a Government and Binding analysis of Modern Greek syntax. No empty subject category is found and so the pro-drop parameter is a misnomer here. Further support for the correlation between parametric variation and inflexional or morphological properties of a language is presented. (Author/LMO)

Examines narrative and expository text from four basal reader series for the occurrence of anaphora. Finds an abundance of anaphora in both. Notes that beginning and developing readers have difficulty in resolving them, and that instructional strategies are needed to help teachers and students deal with this element of cohesion. (RS/JAD)

Five children (27 to 47 months old) with mild to borderline levels of mental retardation were given a milieu language intervention program of 3 or 4 small group training sessions weekly. Results indicated the training had a clear facilitative effect on the acquisition and generalized use of common nouns and verbs by four of the subjects.…

Li's work, which expands the government binding (GB) literature on Chinese linguistics and contributes to understanding constituency and word order, is described. Important issues are noted, empirical or theory-neutral criticisms of Li's accounts are raised, and alternative solutions are offered. (21 references) (LB)

Polysyllabic words from 2 Dutch children from 1;6 to 2;11 were truncated so that they fitted a trochaic (strong-weak SW) pattern, particularly in early samples. Some observations with respect to the (non)realization of determiners suggest an influence of a SW-constraint on the realization of noun phrases. Findings support the hypothesis that words…

Short case studies show that certain inflectional categories, particularly morphological case, cannot be treated as functional heads projecting a phrase of their own. Examples are drawn from Hungarian, Finnish and Finno-Volgaic, Erzya Mordvin, Icelandic, and Turkish. (Contains 27 references.) (LB)

The role of four cues in the assignment of actor role in Arabic was studied. Fifty-four sentences representing all possible permutations of the cues were presented to 100 native speakers of Arabic who were asked to identify the actor in each sentence. (Contains 41 references.) (JL)

Examines the second stage of natural second language attrition in the first language environment observed in a Japanese male returnee child. The subject spent 7 years in the United States, was 8-years-old when he returned, and was highly proficient in English. The second stage is characterized by a period of change in syntax and morphology,…

Offers additional means of evaluating parent speech by examining frequencies of individual nouns, verbs, and descriptors, and examining the learning task presented to children. Study one examines transcripts from the CHILDES database of English-speaking parents' speech to children at five developmental levels; study two examines 50 transcripts of…

This paper analyses an extensive corpus of texts from the German media and existing studies of German perspectives on Poland, Russia, the Czech Republic and Slovenia in order to demonstrate that there are two idealised culture cognitive models (ICCMs) that function as overarching categories for Europe: the ICCM west (the members of the European…

The historical development of written Japanese has resulted in an extremely complex system. Modern Japanese is usually written in logosyllabic script consisting of a combination of "kanji," the Chinese characters, and "kana," the Japanese syllables originally formed from them. There are two types of "kana," the…

This study investigates whether proficient second language (L2) speakers of Spanish and English use the same parsing strategies as monolinguals when reading temporarily ambiguous sentences containing a complex noun phrase followed by a relative clause, such as "Peter fell in love with the daughter of the psychologist who studied in California."…

The interaction hypothesis proposes that valid test accommodations benefit only those with disabilities. To evaluate this hypothesis, Grade 3 students with word decoding difficulties identified with dyslexia and average decoders were randomly assigned to take the same version of the Texas reading accountability assessment under accommodated and…