Comparison of the speech of 37 preschool children with speech-language impairment (SLI), 40 language-matched children, and 45 age-matched children found that errors in a set of morphemes marking tense characterized the SLI children. Evidence supporting the use of these morphemes as clinical markers for SLI is offered. (DB)

Discusses two problematic cases that arose when the Matrix Language frame model of codeswitching was applied to Arabic diglossic switching: a co-occurrence of system morphemes from both varieties of Arabic within a single CP; and CPs in which the word order is that of the dialect but the system morphemes are from Standard Arabic and CPs in which…

Examines the way in which the reading aloud done by a second language learner of English can reveal aspects of the learner's interlanguage. Particular attention is paid to the learner's acquisition of the "-ed" past tense morpheme, and to the acquisition of pronouns. (Author/VWL)

Discusses how deflexion counters certain grammaticalization-related claims and emphasizes the socio-cultural context of overall grammar, arguing that grammaticalization changes must be understood in the context of a grammar's history as a whole. Using data from Swedish, shows that deflexion (directly or indirectly) results in the upgrading of…

Finds an immediate and delayed effect of morphemic and contextual analysis instruction for lesson words; an immediate effect of the instruction for transfer words; no evidence the instruction enhanced students' text comprehension; and students were generally just as effective at inferring word meanings when the instruction was provided in…

This study investigated the relationship between L1 and the developmental sequences for the acquisition of temporal morphology that are predicted by the aspect hypothesis. The use of tense-aspect markers in 7,784 past contexts by 139 Japanese-and French-speaking ESL learners was analyzed. A repeated measures ANOVA supported the predictions of the…

Measures of sentence recall and past tense marking were used to examine the similarities and differences between children with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), children with specific language impairment (SLI), and typically developing (TD) children. Both SLI and ADHD group means for sentence recall tasks were significantly lower…

This study examined how French third (36) and fifth (36) graders used the morphosyntactic context when they spell morphologically complex words with homophonous suffixes (/a/). Participants had to spell adverbs (/a/ transcribed ent) and present participles (/a/ transcribed ant), contrasted on the basis of their frequency, in isolation or embedded…

There is a growing body of research indicating that mechanical drills do not facilitate the development of explicit or implicit knowledge. This study identifies the inadequate aspects of mechanical drills and offers alternative activities for the early stages of language practice, whose formats and features comply with recent research in the…

Are morphological patterns learned in the form of rules? Some models deny this, attributing all morphology to analogical mechanisms. The dual mechanism model (Pinker, S., & Prince, A. (1998). On language and connectionism: analysis of a parallel distributed processing model of language acquisition. "Cognition," 28, 73-193) posits that speakers do…

We report four experiments designed to determine whether visual information affects judgments of acoustically-specified nonspeech events as well as speech events (the "McGurk effect"). Previous findings have shown only weak McGurk effects for nonspeech stimuli, whereas strong effects are found for consonants. We used click sounds that…

The purpose of this study is to examine factors that influence students' reading of derived words. Recent research suggests that the lexical quality of a derived word depends on the familiarity of the word, its morphemic constituents (i.e., base word and affixes), and the frequency with which the base word appears in other words (i.e., members of…

Background: The discovery of clinical markers for specific language impairment (SLI) in children can assist in the accurate identification of children with this disorder, and in a description of the disorder's phenotype for genetic study. One challenge to this type of research is the fact that languages vary in the most salient symptoms of SLI.…

Besides phonotactic principles, orthographies entail graphotactic rules for which the reader must convert a phonological representation on the basis of spelling adaptation rules. In the present study, the learnability of such rules will be investigated with reference to Dutch. Although Dutch orthography can be considered highly regular, there are…

The acquisition order of English morphemes by adult second language learners from Asian language backgrounds was investigated. It was hypothesized that adult speakers of the noninflected Asian languages, having passed the critical stage for second language acquisition without having mastered the linguistic concept of morphology, might face an…