Four experiments support the view of negation as mitigation (Giora, Balaban, Fein, & Alkabets, 2004). They show that when irony involves some sizable gap between what is said and what is criticized (He is exceptionally bright said of an idiot), it is rated as highly ironic (Giora, 1995). A negated version of that overstatement (He is not…

The word virus is not normally considered polymorphemic, yet it is clearly both semantically and orthographically related to the word viral. Thus, the subunit vir takes on the role of a bound morpheme. In contrast, the words future and futile also share a subunit (fut), but are semantically unrelated. The reported experiment demonstrates…

We examine the inflectional productions of seven Catalan, seven Galician, and seven Spanish speaking agrammatic subjects in an elicitation and a sentence repetition task and consider them in the light of the Tree Pruning Hypothesis (TPH). The results show relatively spared subject person/number agreement with the verb and impaired tense marking…

Recent research supports what many teachers already know---that students with a developed understanding that words are combinations of meaningful parts tend to have better vocabularies and stronger reading comprehension performance. These meaningful parts are called morphemes, and the study of them is called morphology. Teaching students to…

Contact with the English language, especially from the 20th century onwards, has had as a consequence an increase in the number of words that are borrowed from English into Spanish. This process is particularly noticeable in Spanish for Specific Purposes, and, more specifically, in the case of Spanish computer language. Although sociocultural and…

This study examines the effects of learners' production (i.e., pushed output) during a multi-stage reconstruction task on learners' noticing of Spanish past tense morphology, aural text comprehension, and development of preterite/imperfect usage in writing. Participants included 47 intermediate L2 Spanish learners in a content-based course at the…

The foundation of all learning is rooted in the development of language and literacy abilities. Literacy development begins well before children enter school and can accelerate in an early childhood classroom setting. Teacher educators often hear about the importance of literacy development. In particular, the significance of phonological…

The relationship between written words and their pronunciation varies considerably among different orthographic systems, and these variations have repercussions on learning to read. Children whose languages have deep orthographies must learn to pronounce larger units, such as rhymes, morphemes, or whole words, to achieve the correct pronunciation…

Several national reports have suggested the usefulness of systematic, explicit, synthetic phonics instruction based on English word structure along with wide reading of quality literature for supporting development in early reading instruction. Other studies have indicated, however, that many in-service teachers are not knowledgeable in the basic…

This paper discusses a problem in semantic analysis of modern standard Thai. The synchronically polysememic morpheme /cay/ has meanings approximately equivalent to English "heart, mind, spirit" and "breath." A purely descriptive approach to this form would require two separate dictionary entries for /cay/. An examination of the…

Are the linguistic forms that are memorized in the mental lexicon and those that are specified by the rules of grammar subserved by distinct neurocognitive systems or by a single computational system with relatively broad anatomic distribution? On a dual-system view, the productive -ed-suffixation of English regular past tense forms (e.g.,…

A previous study of 10 patients with Broca's aphasia demonstrated that the advantage for producing the past tense of irregular over regular verbs exhibited by these patients was eliminated when the two sets of past-tense forms were matched for phonological complexity (Bird, Lambon Ralph, Seidenberg, McClelland, & Patterson, 2003). The…

This study probes the effects of allomorphy on access to Arabic roots and word patterns in two cross-modal priming experiments. Experiment 1 used strong roots which undergo no allomorphy, and weak roots which undergo allomorphy and surface with only two of their three consonants in some derivations. Word pairs sharing a root morpheme prime each…

Morphemes have a powerful impact on the spellings of words in English. We report on two experiments examining young children's knowledge of the effect of suffix morphemes on spelling. In Experiment 1, 5- to 8-year-olds demonstrated awareness of the role of inflections, but not derivations in spelling. Experiment 2 examined whether children might…