This quantitative, diachronic study of the object markers "ba" and "jiang" in Mandarin Chinese challenges the view that these markers have undergone the same process of grammaticalization and have acquired the same function over time. Evidence is provided that shows that, in texts where both are used, each has its own distinctive functions. (36…

Explores the importance of grammatical morphemes for constructing spatially organized situation models, especially how readers infer location in spatial models from prepositions and verb-aspect markers. Shows that grammatical units are as important as lexical units for guiding the construction of situation models during comprehension. (SR)

Demonstrates how the important distinction between the locative and nonlocative implication of a noun is essential for the presence of the Chinese locative particle "li," identifying groups of nouns that can not take the particle, nouns that optionally use the particle, and nouns that must use the particle. (CB)

In reply to the commentary on the research by Anglin reported in this monograph, considers two issues: (1) implications for research on children's vocabulary knowledge that follow from adopting various definitions of what a word is; and (2) the distinction between learning words and constructing word meaning through a knowledge of morphological…

Examined the involvement of derivational word morphology in speech production processes using the word order competition technique to induce a special kind of verbal slip among college students. Results indicated that, in laboratory induced verbal slips, the morphemic components of derived words have a much higher probability of being involved in…

Examines whether phonological representation is an area of weakness for children with specific language impairment (SLI), and whether it contributes to their difficulty with grammatical morphemes. Children with SLI were less able to form fully specified phonological representations of morphemes in conditions of low perceptual salience. (Author/VWL)

A well-known characteristic of children with specific language impairment (SLI) is a significant deficit in grammatical morphology production compared with younger, language-matched, typically developing children. This is true for present tense be (am, is, are), as well as other inflectional morphemes. However, grammatical morpheme learning by…

Contradictory data have been obtained about the processing of singular and plural nouns in Dutch and English. Whereas the Dutch findings point to an influence of the base frequency of the singular and the plural word forms on lexical decision times (Baayen, Dijkstra, & Schreuder, 1997), the English reaction times depend on the surface frequency of…

The present study investigates the production of regular and irregular verbs in the past tense and the comprehension of passive sentences by Greek-speaking PD patients, and compares their behavior to that of normal speakers. Although the two groups manifest large scale differences at all the above constructions, the behavior of PDs is not…

This article investigates one aspect of scientific style in French: the use of tenses. It investigates the claims made in the literature that the verb system of scientific French is a temporal. The frequency of tensed finite forms in 10 French language journal articles on biological sciences is examined. The rhetorical function of past and future…

English-speaking children typically avoid using regular plurals in novel grammatical deverbal compounds as in "rat eater" but allow irregular plurals as in "mice eater" (Gordon, 1985). To explain these data, it has been argued that Kiparsky's (1983) level-ordering model constrains the production of morphologically complex…

Level ordering has proven inadequate as a morphological theory, leaving unexplained the experimental results taken to support it as a component of innate grammar-young children's acceptance of irregular plurals in English compounds. The present study demonstrates that these results can be explained by slower access to the grammatically preferred…

In the present study we have investigated the acquisition of the past participle of Italian verbs of the second (including mostly irregular verbs) and third (including mostly regular verbs) conjugations in school age children, and with simulations with an artificial neural network. We aimed to verify the extent to which children are sensitive to…

The paper examines the first twenty verb-forms recorded for six Hebrew-speaking children aged between 1;2 and 2;1, and how they evolve into fully inflected verbs for three of these children. Discussion focuses first on what word-forms children initially select for the verbs they produce, what role these forms play in children's emergent grammar,…

In 2 picture-naming and 2 grammaticality judgment experiments, the authors explored how the phonological form of a word, especially its termination, affects gender processing by monolinguals and unbalanced bilinguals speaking German. The results of the 2 experiments with native German speakers yielded no significant differences: The reaction times…