It has been argued that children learning a second language (L2) omit agreement inflection because of communication demands. The conclusion of these studies is that L2 children know the morphological and syntactic properties of agreement inflection, but sometimes insert an inflectional default form (i.e., the bare verb) in production. The present…

This study examined the production of three types of noun plural inflections, feminine sound plural (FSP), masculine sound plural (MSP), and broken plural (BP) in Kuwaiti Arabic-speaking children with and without language impairment. A total of thirty-six Kuwaiti participants-twelve adults, twelve children with specific language impairment (SLI),…

This study examined effects of lexical status and neighborhood density of constituent syllables on children's nonword repetition and interactions with nonword length. Lexical status of the target syllable impacted repetition accuracy for the longest nonwords. In addition, children made more errors that changed a nonword syllable to a word syllable…

This study is an investigation of the acquisition of existential constructions (ECs) in English and in Spoken Arabic. It is the first of its kind in that it examines the acquisition of the pieces and the features that form ECs; namely, existential "there," the copula, definiteness, and agreement for English and existential "fii," definiteness,…

Describes two experiments which examined the way in which kindergarteners, first graders, and adults spell syllables like /spa/,/sta/, and /ska/. The proportion of voiced spellings was found to decrease with reading level. The nonstandard spellings were fairly prevalent among children, but almost nonexistent among adults. (SED)

Children were asked to judge/correct sentences in which verb pairs, as predicates, could be associated with propositions or "arguments" which were obligatory for one verb and optional for the other. Results indicated gradual progression with age from initial ignorance to adultlike representation of obligatory and optional arguments for each verb.…

There are problems in interpreting the naming behavior of children. Children may misname a word because the word is absent from their vocabulary, because it is not yet firmly established, or because of a word retrieval or lexical assessing problem. Preliminary results are reported of an experimental technique designed to account for these…

The count/mass disinction is often considered to be a semantic one because it distinguishes those nouns that refer to countable things from those that refer to non-countable things. However, exceptions indicate that semantic properties alone are not sufficient to determine noun sub-categorization. Therefore, such sub-categorization must be defined…

Describes a part of a study on children's acquisition of Warlpiri, an aboriginal language spoken in central Australia, which aimed to find out at what age the children respond consistently to particular word orders and case frames for simple transitive sentences. Makes comparisons with the acquisition of Turkish transitive clauses. (SED)

Examined how object shape, taxonomic relatedness, and prior lexical knowledge influenced children's overextensions (e.g., referring to pomegranates as apples). Researchers presented items that disentangled the three factors and used a novel comprehension task where children could indicate negative exemplars. Error patterns differed by task and by…

This study investigates plural noun forms in Modern Hebrew to show that the pattern of regularization differs for specific words, rather than for classes of words. Early regularization, in which the children add a plural suffix with no stem change, applies unconditionally. Subsequently, the pattern changes and while some words are still…

Reanalyzes Gierut's study that presents a case in which a phonological intervention program is used to effect a phonemic split in a child with a highly restricted phonological system. Three alternatives to Gierut's analysis are presented and discussed. (21 references) (Author/OD)

This paper reports the results of a preliminary study dealing with the ways in which children between ages 6 and 7 organize spoken language. In particular, aspects of the temporal and segmental structure of polysyllabic English words containing the syllable C/jul/, as in the word "pediculous," are dealt with. This study is based on the assumption…

This study examines the production of regular and irregular participle forms of German with high and low frequencies using a speeded production task. 40 children in two age groups (five- to seven-year olds, eleven- to twelve-year olds) and 35 adult native speakers of German listened to stem forms of verbs presented in a sentential context and were…

Data on Dutch-Turkish language-mixing behavior of Turkish children growing up in The Netherlands are presented and analyzed. While functional characteristics of the children's language-mixing were compatible with models from earlier research, structural analysis suggests no universality of surface structure constraint rules for sentence-internal…