Purpose: The authors asked whether adolescents with Down syndrome (DS) could fast-map novel nouns and verbs when word learning depended on using the speaker's pragmatic or syntactic cues. Compared with typically developing (TD) comparison children, the authors predicted that syntactic cues would prove harder for the group with DS to use and that…

An extensive research base on beginning reading acquisition and reading difficulties, developed over the past few decades, has important implications for the teaching of reading. Unfortunately, much of this research does not appear to be reaching teachers, whose knowledge is essential for scientific findings about reading to benefit children. This…

This study investigates the effect of a cross-cultural bilingual communication project on students' second language learning. A collaborative key-pal project was conducted between Japanese university students learning English and Canadian university students learning Japanese. Ethnographic data were collected from the students' exchanged messages…

The goal of this study was to examine the role of Indian bilingual parents' book reading practices on the development of the children's oral language, narrative and literacy skills in English, their second language. About 24 bilingual children from two preschools in Bangalore, India were tested in schools in English on receptive vocabulary,…

This article suggests a possible link between incipient stuttering and early difficulty in language formulation. The hypothesis offers a unifying explanation of an array of empirical observations. Among these observations are the following: early stuttering occurs only on the first word of a syntactic structure; stuttering does not appear to be…

Recent research on comparatives in the Muskogean language, Alabama, suggest similar work for Koasati, the language most closely related to Alabama. Koasati has a system parallel to that of Alabama. Although the actual morphemes used for comparative constructions in Koasati are almost identical to the ones used in Alabama, the syntax of such…

Locative inversion, one aspect of word order in English discourse in which the positions of verb and noun phrase are inverted (e.g., "in front of the house is a tree"), is examined. It is argued that inversions after deictic adverbs and those after non-deictic, locative constituents are related, both representing devices: (1) expressing point of…

The working papers in this volume, written by staff and advanced students of the Summer Institute of Linguistics at the University of North Dakota, include the following: "The Antigone Constraint" (David Tuggy); "Clause Types in Southeastern Tepehuan" (Thomas L. Willett); "Sentence Components in Southeastern Tepehuan"…

Some syntactic patterns of the variety of English used by students in the final year of formal learning of English are analyzed. In addition, the nature of the lectal continuum of South Asian English (SAE) is discussed, including alternative conceptions of Standard SAE and evaluation of other lects. The discussion is based on an analysis of…

A study of infant language acquisition investigated the possibility that perceptual or attentional tendencies may guide early word learning by directing infants' attention in linguistically relevant ways. In the experiment, infants aged 9 to 13 months watched a puppet show; with some children, sentences labeling either the objects (noun-frame…

An analysis of Gungbe, an African language, proposes that the determiner phrase (DP) has a head-initial underlying structure, and that the determiner system involves a more articulated structure, with the DP including different functional projections. The determiner and its number projection host the specificity marker and the number marker…

The structure of complementation in complex predicates in Korean has attracted configurational analysis. Using a lexical functional grammar (LFG) framework, this paper examines the structure of complementation in complex predicates. The term "predicate" in this context is used to describe both verbs and adjectives that are assumed to…

A number of Seri verbs display a sensitivity to whether a goal, which is a term used for recipients, adressees, etc., is singular or plural. The data presented in this paper are of typological interest. It is argued that Seri has indirect objects, but that there is no one-to-one mapping between the semantic role goal and either the syntactic…

This paper focuses on the long-standing problem in Bantu syntax of why some objects lose the ability to be realized as object markers (OMs) in the passive. The standard answer to this question since the work of Gary and Keenan (1977) is that the passive and object marker require the same property (e.g., a grammatical relation or a particular case)…

A discussion of the animacy hierarchy in human discourse looks at the role of the hierarchy in three Western Austronesian languages: Tagalog, Bahasa Indonesia, and Rejang. Animacy corresponds to the degree of agency an entity has with a transitive verb as contrasted with the degree to which that entity may be the patient of a transitive verb. The…