This study extended an existing crosslinguistic model of verb-marking errors in children's early multiword speech (MOSAIC) by adding a novel mechanism that defaults to the most frequent form of the verb where this accounts for a high proportion of forms in the input. Our simulations showed that the resulting model not only provides a better…

Two experiments and two corpus studies focus on homophone dominance in the spelling of regularly inflected verb forms, the phenomenon that the higher-frequency homophone causes more intrusion errors on the lower-frequency one than vice versa. Experiment 1 was a speeded dictation task focusing on the Dutch imperative, a verb form whose formation…

This dissertation investigates the acquisition of early verb inflection in child Slovenian from morphosyntactic and morphophonological perspectives. It centers on the phenomenon of root nonfinites, particularly the patterns of omission and substitution errors in verb inflection marking. It argues that every acquisition model needs to account…

In this study, we use corpus analysis and computational modelling techniques to compare two recent accounts of the OI stage: Legate & Yang's (2007) Variational Learning Model and Freudenthal, Pine & Gobet's (2006) Model of Syntax Acquisition in Children. We first assess the extent to which each of these accounts can explain the level of OI errors…

Three- and four-year-old children were asked to perform a judgement task in which they chose between incorrect English transitives and intransitives and their correct adult equivalents. Purely semantic or syntactic models fail to explain the findings as well as does a model based on semantic/syntactic transitivity. (SED)

Presents data from a positron emission tomographic study in which subjects were asked to produce the past tense forms of regular, irregular and nonce stems. Findings, which support the grammar/lexicon linguistic theories, reveal different amounts and areas of cortical activation in the regular and irregular tasks, as well as significantly…

Focuses on understanding the mechanisms that underlie the production of homophone confusions in writing. The article overviews five experiments demonstrating that the homophone effect can be experimentally induced in French adults. Findings are interpreted in the framework of an activation model. (45 references) (Author/CK)

This paper presents a model of syntax acquisition, whose main points are as follows: Syntax is acquired in an item-based manner; early learning facilitates subsequent learning--as evidenced by the accelerating rate of new verbs entering a given structure; and mastery of syntactic knowledge is typically achieved through practice--as evidenced by…

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…