Syntactic structure has been considered an integral component of agreement computation in language production. In agreement error studies, clause-boundedness (Bock & Cutting, 1992) and hierarchical feature-passing (Franck, Vigliocco, & Nicol, 2002) predict that local nouns within clausal modifiers should produce fewer errors than do those within…

This study examines syntactic and morphological aspects of the production and comprehension of pronouns by 99 typically developing French-speaking children aged 3 years, 5 months to 6 years, 5 months. A fine structural analysis of subject, object, and reflexive clitics suggests that whereas the object clitic chain crosses the subject chain, the…

Present a study in which Arab subjects were to change 10 English declarative sentences into yes/no questions. Results showed 25.6 percent of the answers were erroneous. An attempt is made to account for the source of error. Most errors were not due to effects of the native language, but to the verb form used. (PJM)

Suggests a way of looking at difficulties students have in using words appropriately, and an approach for presenting this information to students. The discussion concentrates on: (1) restrictions on words that can co-occur; and (2) rules for the grammatical marking of various noun phrases that occur with certain verbs and adjectives. (Author/PJM)

Examines how speakers and listeners make judgments on the relationship and truth of propositions connected by subordinating conjunctions. (EKN)

In an attempt to answer some of the questions concerning the roles of syntactic vs. semantic cues and the similarities and/or differences between the first (L1) and second (L2) language reading strategies, a pilot study was conducted with 47 English-speaking students enrolled in French as a second language classes at a bilingual, English-French…

As part of a larger study of the oral reading of elementary school students representing eight linguistic populations in the United States, a study was conducted to discover why readers make the same miscues at the same point in a text and to discover factors in the text that contribute to this phenomenon. Subjects were second, fourth, and sixth…

Argues that children's OV utterances cannot be related transformationally to VO utterances because children initially acquire OV and VO with different sets of verbs, and also argues that L2 acquisition data can be accounted for within a model of L1 structural transfer, without requiring adult learner access to Universal Grammar. (Author/LMO)

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…

This study explored the dichotomy between global errors, that is, those violating rules of overall sentence structure, and local errors, that is, those violating rules within a particular constituent of a sentence, and the relationship of these to communication breakdown. The focus was tense continuity across clauses (TC) and subject-verb…

The parameter-setting model of universal grammar provides a basis for integrating two theories of second language acquisition: contrastive analysis and creative construction. The elicited responses of adult native speakers of Spanish and adult native speakers of Japanese were examined. The head-initial/head-final parameter was the principle…