Discusses the Puerto Rican dialect and its peculiar placement of subject pronouns. Notes the linguistic variety in the dialect as well as its use of verbs connotating mental and communicative activity and constructions of relativity. These distinctions give rise to the functional hypothesis to account for the peculiarities of Spanish in the…

Examined Grade 8 French immersion students use and accuracy of pronominal verbs within one of two tasks--jigsaw or dictogloss--while working in pairs. Two groups of students viewed a videotaped mini-lesson on pronominal verbs, while another two did not. Found that the mini-lesson had a significant impact on students' use of pronominal verbs in…

Assesses verb phrase development in three Trinidadian children in which Standard English and Trinidad Creole coexist. Adverbials were found to be crucial in delineating specific areas of semantic intent. (20 references) (GLR)

In a French study based on Spanish research, the communicative effectiveness and grammatical accuracy of foreign language students in generating appropriate classroom questions was investigated. Despite language differences, similarities were found in communication errors, especially incorrect interrogative words and structures, verb tenses and…

A review of recent research concerning the syntactical and grammatical characteristics of business German precedes an exploration of the occurrence and sequencing of these characteristics in American college textbooks. Particular attention is given to the passive voice. (Author/CB)

Presents various learning activities and instructional materials for helping students learn French or Spanish grammar and culture. These materials include flash cards and lists of items to be used on labels. Activities include using the flash cards, writing newspaper ads in the foreign language, and naming the different items in a house. (CK)

Investigated children's understanding of meaning of the cognitive verb "know" (as defined by an abstractness and conceptual difficulty hierarchy). Found that knowledge increased with development, and low levels of meaning were mastered before high levels, and more rapidly. Understanding in audio-taped stories was more difficult than in video-taped…

Preterite/Imperfect (PI) usage is one of the hardest grammatical features of Spanish to learn. Some of the blame lies with misleading textbook explanations. A discussion of problematic P/I textbook explanations shows why the presentation of a more reliable set of principles is a preferable alternative to questionable rules of thumb. (18…

Investigated adult and three- and five-year-old children's use of verb inflections to guide their initial mapping of verb meanings in two studies that explored use of the -ing and -ed verb inflections during mapping of novel verb meanings. Results are applied to implications for early verb learning and the use of the bootstrapping construct in…

Examined overregularization of irregular verb forms in children's language learning. Found that overregularization errors are relatively rare; occur at a constant rate; and are not correlated with the proportion of regular verbs in parents' or children's speech. Also found that a period of correct performance precedes the child's first error. (BC)

Examines the rate of phrase structure change in Yiddish, using quantitative methods to estimate the rate of change of structurally ambiguous verb clauses. Four subcases of phrase structure change are distinguished, three of which provide strong evidence for the Constant Rate Hypothesis of linguistic change. (MDM)

Examines grammaticality judgments on dative constructions among Korean, Japanese, and Chinese learners of English by replicating Ellis (1991). Focus is on predicting the learners' judgments on the grounds of lexical functional grammar (LFG). Examines six predictions derived mainly from LFG. (Author/VWL)

Looks at naturalistic samples of adult-to-child speech to determine whether variations in the input are consistent with reported variations in the proportions of nouns and verbs in children's early vocabularies. Naturalistic speech samples from English-, Italian-, and Mandarin-speaking children and their caregivers were examined. (Author/JL)

Examined how rules for interpreting empty category (EC) subjects of complement clauses vary crosslinguistically across structural and lexical dimensions. Twenty-three Greek-speaking 4- and 5-year-olds and 10 adults, 29 Spanish-speaking 4- and 5-year-olds, 18 6- and 7-year-olds, and 8 adults took part in act-out experiments. Results indicate an…

Examines the development of children's understanding of the difference between "want" and "need" in two different experiments. The first experiment required the children to respond verbally in choosing between the two concepts; the second required them to give an object to one of two characters who had made a request using…