Seventy-two children, 18 from each of grades three, six, nine, and twelve, participated in a study of developmental changes in children's knowledge about the morphological structures underlying the spoken form of complex derived words. Three oral language tests were used to show when and how children learn that derived words are not unanalyzable…

This book introduces a specific approach to sentence analysis by comparing traditional grammar with newer methods, including transformational grammar. The first chapter discusses the teaching of grammar and language skills and the use of standard and nonstandard dialects. Traditional grammar is defined and discussed in chapter 2. The other…

This book focuses on the nature and development of knowledge concerning grammar and the meanings coded by grammar. This knowledge is inferred from performance, from sentences and the settings in which they are spoken, and from signs of comprehension or incomprehension of sentences by preschool children. The first two stages of linguistic…

This paper addresses itself to the question of whether the high degree of abstractness in Chomsky's and Halle's analysis of English vowels is justified. Secondarily, two related topics are discussed: (1) limitations on the tongue-height features [+low] and [+high] and (2) the role of rule features in phonological rules. Numerous examples of a more…

The author proposes that dissimilation, like assimilation, be considered a natural linguistic process, motivated by perceptual (psychological factors, which operates to preserve the distinctiveness of the stem-affix relationship. Defining dissimilation as the process which occurs when twosegments in the same word share the same phonetic features…

Morphological features in the speech of Southern white and Negro students at four grade levels were studied by an instrument designed to test the students' knowledge of fifteen inflectional endings (including the allomorphs of the regular plural, singular possessive and third person singular present, absence of the plural possessive, and the…

Using a forced-choice matching-to-sample procedure five factors were varied: position of phoneme; contrast between words; type of phoneme; redundant visual cue; and allophonic variation. Performance improved significantly after four days of training for all but allophonic variation. Redundant visual cue greatly improved performance during training…

Recommends a method of teaching Russian vocabulary that focuses on new words in context and on their structure: root, prefix, suffix, sound changes, and borrowings. Sources for teachers are given in the bibliography. (LMO)

Reports on a morpheme study conducted with learners of English as a foreign language in Poland which found some similarities between foreign- and second-language accuracy in orders of morphemes. (Author/CB)

Presents an analysis of code switching that relies on general principles of phrase structure and rejects constraints specific to code switching. This model is shown to account for intersentential switches between typologically different languages such as Farsi and English, including within word switches and switches between modifiers and nouns.…

This article reviews recent research on children's knowledge and acquisition of derivational morphology across studies of listening, speaking, reading, and spelling. The paper concludes that this dimension of language organization deserves more attention than it now receives in language instruction. (Author/JDD)

This study compared the relative effectiveness of imitative intervention and conversational recast language intervention applied to grammatical morpheme and complex sentences in 21 children with specific language impairment. The conversational procedure was found to require fewer presentations to first spontaneous use and to produce more…

Examines mean length of utterance (MLU) in morphemes as a predictor of the grammatical complexity of the natural language corpora of normal preschoolers and of children and adolescents with delayed language, Fragile X Syndrome, Down Syndrome, and autism. (43 references) (GLR)

Provides an analysis, based on theory-independent structural information, of the structure of postadverbials associated with the Mandarin morpheme "de," arguing that "de" does not stand for a unique morpheme, but for three homophonous ones. (24 references) (CB)