Evaluation of the speech perception of eight children (ages four and five) with specific language impairments and documented morphological difficulties found these children to be especially weak in discriminating speech stimuli whose contrastive portions had shorter durations than the noncontrastive portions (typical of English grammatical…

Production of grammatical morphemes was examined in free speech samples from 34 4-year-olds with history of slow expressive language development (SELD) and control group. Both the SELD children who had caught up in mean length of utterance by age four and those who had not had acquired fewer grammatical morphemes than controls, though acquisition…

Tested children in grades one, three, and five on their knowledge of a large sample of words. Found that comprehension of derived words improved dramatically from grade one to grade five and that words consisting of more than two morphemes were not well known by first graders but were relatively better known by fifth graders. (BC)

Comments on the research by Anglin reported in this monograph by considering two points. First, discusses possible problems in defining what a word is. Second, examines some problems with the methodology in vocabulary development research that involves testing individuals' knowledge of words by sampling words from dictionaries. (BC)

Six experiments involving 155 adults studied whether lexical entry for derivationally suffixed and prefixed words is morphologically structured, and how this relates to the semantic and phonological relationship between stem and affix. Results with 155 adults suggest that the morpheme is the basic unit in which the lexicon is organized. (SLD)

Five experiments examined 15- and 18-month olds' sensitivity to morphosyntactic dependencies. Results indicated that 18-month olds, but not 15-month olds, were sensitive to basic relationship between "is" and "-ing" and that 18-month-olds could track relationships between functor morphemes. Findings were consistent with hypothesis that 18-month…

Shows that looking at individual semantic functions of grammatical morphemes is essential to explaining particular cases of noniconicity between lexical categories and their discourse functions. It is suggested that, in light of this importance of the functions of individual grammatical morphemes, it is now easier to evaluate why…

Introduces this special issue of the journal and reports on new directions in the research that began with code switching, but increasingly has come to include other types of language contact phenomena. The articles in the issue report on analyses and explanations for a variety of outcomes in bilingual production. (Author/VWL)

Introduces the articles in this issue of "Language Sciences," which are dedicated to taking stock of both grammaticalization and so-called "grammaticalization theory." This introduction sets the stage for other papers by surveying the large range of definitions of grammaticalization in the literature and placing them in…

Scrutinizes claims that grammaticalization is a process and tests diachronic grammaticalization-based claims regarding the so-called Pro-Drop parameter. (Author/VWL)

The appearance of filler syllables in the late-word period is analyzed in relation to the emergence of grammatical morphemes, by confronting data from the longitudinal study of one child acquiring French, with four hypotheses making different claims about the kind of language knowledge underlying their production. (Author/VWL)

In this paper, we show that both token and type-based effects in lexical processing can result from a single, token-based, system, and therefore, do not necessarily reflect different levels of processing. We report three Simple Recurrent Networks modeling Dutch past-tense formation. These networks show token-based frequency effects and type-based…

It has been shown that the processing of irregular past-tense forms is affected by phonological factors that are inherent in the relationship of the past-tense forms to other words in the lexicon (rhyming families of irregulars) or to their base forms (vowel dominance effects). This paper addresses more ephemeral phonological effects. In a…

This article presents several vocabulary-expanding prefix and suffix activities that will help students become master word builders. Games such as Base-Word Bingo and Spin-a-Word Game are great activities for practicing forming and spelling new words.

The failure of inhibition hypothesis posits a theoretical distinction between implicit and explicit access in deep dyslexia. Specifically, the effects of failure of inhibition are assumed only in conditions that have an explicit selection requirement in the context of production (i.e., aloud reading). In contrast, the failure of inhibition…