Previous studies of verb morphology in children with specific language impairment (SLI) have been limited in the main to tense and agreement morphemes. Cantonese, which, like other Chinese languages, has no grammatical tense, presents an opportunity to investigate potential difficulties for children with SLI in other areas of verb morphology, via…

An ongoing debate in Arabic morphology concerns the nature of the smallest unit governing lexical organization and representation in this language. A standard model maintains that Arabic words are typically analyzable into a three-consonantal root morpheme carrying the core meaning of words and a prosodic template responsible mostly for…

The Malay language has a transparent morphological system and, unlike English, it is written in a very shallow alphabetic-syllabic script. We predicted that beginner spellers (six-to eight-year-olds) of this Rumi script would encode words at the level of the syllable and morpheme, rather than the phoneme. Using the results of a 75-item spelling…

Most models of visual word recognition in alphabetic orthographies assume that words are lexically organized according to orthographic similarity. Support for this is provided by form-priming experiments that demonstrate robust facilitation when primes and targets share similar sequences of letters. The authors examined form-orthographic priming…

The purpose of this study was to assess phonological and morphosyntactic change in children with co-occurring speech and language impairments using different goal attack strategies. Participants included 47 preschoolers, ages 3;0 (years;months) to 5;11, with impairments in both speech and language: 40 children in the experimental group and 7 in a…

Global English is under contestation. Although some consider lingua franca English (LFE) as a neutral medium or code that does not belong to any specific culture or nationality, others see the deceptive nature of this linguistic globalization. Along with Spring (2007/this issue), they see global English as embodying partisan interests and values.…

In many languages, the production of noun phrases requires the selection of gender-marked elements like determiners or inflectional suffixes. There is a recent debate as to whether the selection of freestanding gender-marked elements, such as determiners, follows the same processing mechanisms as the selection of bound gender-marked morphemes,…

Spatial relations in American Sign Language (ASL) are often signed from the perspective of the signer and so involve a shift in perspective and mental rotation. This study examined developing knowledge of language used to refer to the spatial relations "front," "behind," "left," "right," "towards," "away," "above," and "below" by children learning…

Through discussion and illustrative events, an evolving segment of communication is described during the course of transition of one child's total communication system from the sensorimotor or gestural level at 12 months into the level of use of the adult words "more" and "mine," and associated utterances, at 24 months. (Author/RM)

Paper presented May 1973, Dresden, East Germany. (DD)

This study examines the relative contributions of rote-memorization, analogic formation and rule-operation in the production of plurals. Rule-operation was found to be important in that children producing responses characteristic of a given stage did not produce responses for later stages. Contributions of analogic formation and rote-memorization…

Major findings are reported of a longitudinal, naturalistic study of grammatical morpheme development in an aphasic child from 5;5 to 6;1. The majority of the morphemes were not acquired in the same order nor at the same mean length of utterance (MLU) levels reported for normal children. As an alternative to the normal acquisition model, based on…

Psycholinguistic knowledge and techniques can be used as the basis for reading process research with a view to the development of a reading theory. The initial phase of such a study is reported, and reading behavior on a comprehensive basis is examined. The assumption upon which the research is based is that reading miscues are generated by the…

The use of linguistic principles in selecting reading materials is relatively recent. Several years ago at Wayne State University, over 200 principles were identified as possible criteria for the selection of materials. About 50 of these were linguistic principles, some of which conflicted with the others. Descriptive linguistics seems, at…

The tone-changing rules in Central (Standard) Thai are traditionally analyzed as having five contrasting tones--mid, low, high, falling, and rising. (Abramson's graph of the fundamental frequency variations for single vowel Thai syllables illustrates these five tones.) Theoretically, each tone may be part of any Thai syllable. Any Thai syllable…