Presents some suggestions for the writing of poetry to expand vocabulary in the target language. Since poetry demands preciseness, writing poetically helps students develop this language skill. (Author/CK)

Systematically explored how three different initial training contexts affect children's and adults' interpretation of novel action verbs. Subjects included 54 3-yearolds, 60 10-year olds, and 60 college-age adults. Findings suggest a hierarchy of verb learning strategies, especially among the youngest children. (DR)

Investigated third and sixth graders' understanding of factive presupposition using two tasks: one requiring an abstract truth judgment of the verb complement, the other calling for informal judgment of consistency between the target sentence and the negation of its complement. Results indicated the development of factive presupposition is an…

Offers an analysis of native speech data as a base for teaching the past tense in German. Interviews with native speakers revealed that the present perfect serves as the dominant past tense for main verbs; modal verbs, the copula "sein,""haben," and certain formulaic expressions occur in the preterite; and past tense use is linked to contextual…

A study investigated the extent to which the nature of verb input accounts for the order in which children acquire verbs. Subjects were 57 mothers and their Stage I children. Results suggest that the effect of syntactic diversity in input supports the "syntactic bootstrapping" account of how children use structural information to learn new verbs'…

Assessed developments in the theory of mind suggested by changes in the organization of cognitive verb extensions during elementary school years. Found three major changes with development: increased understanding of the role of memory in input functions, increased interrelatedness of memory- and comprehension-related verbs, and increased…

Argues for a fundamental structural similarity between serial verb constructions, widely known from Kwa languages, and v-v compounds in Japanese. A major theoretical implication of the analysis is that it supports an analysis of clausal structure where the external argument is not included in the immediate projection of a verb but is introduced by…

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.…

Provides information regarding the input-to-intake phenomenon by exploring data that were gathered but not analyzed in Shook (1994): reading recalls produced by subjects after reading the input passages. Two levels of Spanish students read reading passages containing one of two different target items under one of three different attention…

Investigated how adult learners of English-as-a-Second- Language (ESL) process sentences containing verbs that are temporarily ambiguous in interpretation between a main verb and a reduced relative clause. Seventeen Chinese, 17 Korean or Japanese, and 17 Romance learners with advanced ESL proficiency and a comparison group of 17 monolingual native…

Connectionist accounts of inflectional morphology have focused on domain of English past tense in which default process (add/ed) reflects process of suffixation adopted by majority of forms in the language. Arabic plural system is one where a minority default process operates. The study contrasts two types of default process that might lead to a…

Basque auxiliary verbs encode tense, agreement relations with ergative, absolutive, and dative arguments, which constitute an inflectional verbal amalgam whose acquisition is not problematic for Spanish-speaking children but is for Spanish-speaking adults. This asymmetry is due to different processes by which the inflectional amalgam is acquired.…

Presents three related experiments on the acquisition of two classes of causative verbs: physical change of state verbs with agentive subjects and psychological change of state verbs with experiencer objects in English, Spanish, and Turkish as second languages by speakers whose native languages are English, Spanish, Turkish, and Japanese.…

Focuses on the errors made in lexical verb choice in speech by a small group of advanced learners of English. Findings indicate that while these learners may have a broad outline of verb meaning, their knowledge is hazy concerning contextual and collocational restrictions. Advanced learners may require detailed classroom vocabulary work on simple…

Examines knowledge of semantics-syntax correspondences in second-language acquisition (SLA) within the Principles and Parameters framework. A parameter of semantic structure is used to investigate change of state locatives and "psychological" verbs. Results indicate that for some learners, first-language influence persists until advanced stages of…