This investigation encompassed a full-scale experiment for both Japanese and Korean university students and looked at the following: the role of grammaticality-judgment tasks (GJT) in second-language acquisition; the learners' behaviors when they were asked to do GJT; and the reasons why the learners made the wrong grammatical judgments.…

Examined individual growth rates in definitional skill over a period of 3 to 6 years, for 68 low-income children. Results of the study support the notion that definitional skill is related to being part of an academic culture; low-income mothers, whose formal schooling is complete, generally do not give oral definitions to simple nouns as well as…

Focuses on understanding the mechanisms that underlie the production of homophone confusions in writing. The article overviews five experiments demonstrating that the homophone effect can be experimentally induced in French adults. Findings are interpreted in the framework of an activation model. (45 references) (Author/CK)

Proposes an alternative account of the child's learning of nouns and adjectives that relies on properties of the semantic categories to be learned and of the word-learning task itself. In five experiments, a simple connectionist network was trained to label input objects in particular contexts; the network learned categories resembling nouns…

This study investigates the influence of using five web-based practice units on English verb-noun collocations with the design of a web-based Chinese-English bilingual concordancer (keyword retrieval program) on collocation learning. Thirty-two college EFL students participated by taking a pre-test and two post-tests, and responding to a…

Two experiments sought to extend the demonstration of English-learning infants' abilities to segment nouns from fluent speech to a new lexical class: verbs. Moreover, we explored whether two factors previously shown to influence noun segmentation, stress pattern (strong-weak or weak-strong) and type of initial phoneme (consonant or vowel), also…

Five experiments investigated the interpretation of quantified noun phrases in relation to discourse structure. They demonstrated, using questionnaire and on-line reading techniques, that readers in English prefer to give a quantified noun phrase in (VP-external) subject position a presuppositional interpretation, in which the noun phrase limits…

Comparison of Vietnamese-Australians' perception and production of the English compound-phrasal contrast with that of native English-speaking Australians indicated that the number of syllables and consonant clusters alien to Vietnamese phonology and length of residence in Australia were major factors affecting the Vietnamese-Australians'…

Purpose: Verb processing in early sequential Spanish-English bilinguals was investigated. Primary study goals were to identify potential patterns of development in relative levels of verb processing efficiency in a 1st (L1) and 2nd (L2) language and to investigate factors influencing cognitive control of the dual-language system in developing…

The positional definition of Hausa noun and verb, which uses person and aspect markers "y, s, and t" as criteria, is criticized as an unreliable framework for identification of nouns and verbs. It is proposed that this is so for nouns because a word may appear as a noun without any of the three markers. Verbs are more central than the…

Dedicated to Margaret Langdon at the University of California, San Diego, for her contributions to Yuman studies, this volume of occasional papers contains papers presented at two conferences on Hokan-Penutian languages. The papers and presenters are as follows: "Yuman Linguistics: The Work of Margaret Langdon" (Leanne Hinton), which is…

This book of supplemental exercises is one of a series of books designed to provide educational materials for students in addition to the instructional texts in the Adult Learning Skills Program. Exercises in this basic level book are for the English subject area. Course numbers and exercise topics are: 301 (subjects and predicates, sentence…

A study of young children's assignment of nouns to gender categories and general mastery of the Icelandic gender system is reported. An examination of what is involved in the induction of formal categories such as gender introduces the proposal of a "principle of localness." This principle states that the closer in proximity a closed…

A study of the use of the complex Finnish morphological rule system in 45 children, aged 20-24 months, examined the children's inflection of nouns and verbs in speech characteristic of everyday Finnish. Analysis of the correct, unanswered, and incorrect test items found six classes of errors, which were then examined for clues to the underlying…

This guide presents a system for determining the qender of French nouns that has been tested against 12,000 pages of general reading: novels, history, social science, law, finance, and the Bible. The guide discusses the rules for determining gender and also presents various lists of the non-routine or exceptions to the rules. It is asserted that…