Studies on the acquisition of relative clauses are reviewed. Two polarities among a variety of possible approaches are: Slobin's (1971) study that emphasizes acquisition process and learning strategies, and studies like Sheldon's (1974) that emphasize the linguistic structures involved. Early proposals that children experience more difficulty in…

Four problems in children's paired-associate memory were addressed: (1) reappraisal of the presumed developmental trend in presentation mode effect during grade-school years, (2) identification of the locus of this developmental effect, (3) evaluation of the influence of combined presentation (verbal plus pictorial) relative to pictorial…

In a study of paradigmatic responding, 14 educable mentally retarded (EMR) boys from a training school were matched on chronological age (CA) and Stanford-Binet IQ scores. Six served as controls, six as experimental subjects, and two as training controls. They were pretested individually for a baseline measure of their paradigmatic responses to…

This summary gathers together for easy reference the inflected forms of Literary Sinhala together with a transliteration guide to the writing system. This work differs, therefore, from the authors' previous work, "Literary Sinhala" (1974), which presented the inflected forms in a pedagogical sequence. In this summary, the inflected forms…

In the surface structure of Chinese nominal modifiers (quantifiers, determiners, adjectives, measure phrase, relative clause, etc.) may occur either before or after a modified noun. In most of the transformational studies of Chinese syntax (e.g. Cheng 1966; Hashimoto 1966; Mei 1972; Tai 1973; Teng 1974), it has been assumed that such NP's have the…

This is a state-of-the-art review of word formative morphology. The paper surveys three loosely knit 'schools' of word formation: (1) the Generative school, (2) the Continental school, and (3) the Slavicist school. It points out that much work in word formation is being duplicated because of a lack of coordination and communication between the…

The paper constitutes an attempt to provide a nonenumerative characterization of agreeing terms and agreement features. The following pertinent statements turn out to be (near) exceptionless: only coreferential terms agree, and for any given language all agreement features are pronominal ones. Four agreement features, gender, number, definiteness,…

The paper begins with a discussion of several recently proposed analyses of nominal compounds in English. It is then suggested that the relations which may appropriately underlie nominal compounds of the type Noun + Noun can best be defined negatively, i.e. by listing those relations between two nouns which cannot underlie compounds rather than…

This paper asserts the "unquestionable" relevance of linguistic insights in the training of and subsequent use by teachers of English as a foreign language. Although the author agrees with Chomsky's view that linguistics has nothing to offer the teacher in the form of specific proposals for language teaching methodology, he argues that linguistics…

This paper seeks to formulate a principle that explains the working of the Japanese number system with respect to Japanese nouns and that defines the kinds of nouns and contexts that condition the forms of number expressions. It is the author's theory that in applying numbers to nouns, the Japanese make a formal distinction between things they…

Run-on sentences are common mistakes made by Chinese English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students. One type of these errors, with the structure of an expletive subject "there" and a verb "to be" at the beginning of the sentence, is persistent and not easy to detect and correct. This study proposes that this type of error…

This paper describes situational Navajo language immersion programs, explaining that situational classrooms recreate a situation in which students need Navajo to communicate and noting that Navajo is a very verb centered language. Situational Navajo takes many of the recurring situations in the school and family setting and makes them the core of…

Nouns were presented in triads as pictures, printed words, or spoken words and followed by various types of interference. Measures of short- and long-term memory were obtained. In short-term memory, pictorial superiority occurred with acoustic, and visual and acoustic, but not visual interference. Long-term memory showed superior recall for…

This article reports on a study designed to obtain data on the first words understood and produced by eight infants. It provides a descriptive account of the earliest levels of language comprehension and allows comparison of lexical development in comprehension and production. (Author/CFM)

Points out that in languages in which nouns have a grammatical gender, word recognition can be estimated by gender-decision response times. Notes that although gender decision has yet to be used extensively, it has proved sensitive to several factors affecting lexical access and that this task can be used with linguistic information from other…