Research supported by grants from the National Research Council of Canada and from the University of Western Ontario Research Fund. (DS)

Experiments using memory paradigms have shown that general terms receive context-dependent encodings. This experiment investigates the encoding of category and instance nouns. The results indicate that representations set up during reading are the product of both the linguistic input and of general knowledge. (Author/KC)

Reports that primary school children learned high imagery nouns in fewer trials than low imagery nouns and that second-grade children learned the nouns in fewer trials than did first-grade children. (FL)

Examines the patterns of word formation as found in written English and written Chinese, contrasting the role of compounding, derivation, inflection, and word length as they relate to noun formation. Implications are drawn for the translator. (AM)

Children aged six and eight were required to recall transitive sentences, some with an animate actor and inanimate acted-upon element, and some with these reversed. It appeared that children prefer to put the animate noun first and this affects their choice of active or passive sentence voice. (Author/SJL)

Reports on experiments examining the semantic organization of concrete nouns and verbs and its development in childhood. Differences in semantic organization are said to be a clue to age-related changes in performance with verbs. (AM)

Examined young children's language productivity with newly learned forms by teaching them four new words: two nouns and two verbs. Findings indicate children combined the novel nouns productively with already known words much more often than they did the novel verbs--by many orders of magnitude and several children pluralized the new nouns,…

The influence of information level on the production of accuracy of 20 children was examined. Data were children's productions of nouns in sets of utterances referring to triplets of pictures representing noun-verb-noun utterances. (Author/JL)

In this study, non-French participants learned gender-appropriate adjectives for 24 French nouns. Findings indicate that learning the same set of feminine French nouns could be made more or less difficult when the nouns in the masculine category created more or less competition. (45 references) (Author/CK)

Discusses "end-weight," long, complex phrases that tend to come at the end of clauses. Corpus data on heavy noun phrase shift, the dative alternation, and particle movement indicate that there are several structural measures of weight highly correlated with constituent ordering. (38 references) (Author/CK)

Presents the results of a study that explored the management of subject-verb agreement in second -to seventh-grade children studying the French language. Examined whether agreement with imperfect tense may have a lesser cost than agreement with the present. Finds that imperfect tense is acquired more rapidly than present tense. (CMK)

Analyzes the rightward movement of noun and prepositional phrases in the Early Old English poem "Beowulf." Evidence is provided for heavy noun phrase shift, with a characteristic major intonational boundary between the main verb and the postponed noun phrase, and preposition phrase extraposition, where the intonational boundary was much…

Examines the acquisition of sex-neutral uses of masculine terms by English and Spanish speaking children and suggests that knowledge of the acquisition sex-neutral uses of gender markers may lead to insight into children's approaches to word meaning. The use of sex-neutral masculine terms and their impact on the status of women is also discussed.…

Examines the rules that determine presence or absence of the definite article with place names in English. To help students of English-as-a-Second-Language learn when to use the definite article, a prototype concept is proposed based on the notions "at home" and "on the road." (23 references) (OD)

Analysis of how students of English for Science and Engineering use certain categories of nouns in their technical writing projects revealed a significant use of "sub-technical" and "text-structuring" words serving both referential and discourse-oriented functions. The use of matching or cloze-type and open-ended writing exercises to improve…