The study, involving 48 hearing-impaired (HI) students, found that HI middle school students using microcomputers to telecommunicate with other hearing-impaired students tended to outperform (in language skills) HI students telecommunicating with normal hearing peers and HI control group students receiving microcomputer instruction without…

Examines the influence of a proposed implicational hierarchy and constraints of Universal Grammar on acquisition of noun incorporation processes by 29 adult learners of Samoan, compared to the performance of a control group of 11 native Samoan speakers. Methodology involved reaction time, grammaticality judgment, and response certainty measures.…

Disfluent phenomena such as pauses, hesitations, and repairs are investigated in 42 short samples of spontaneous speech of native French speakers and learners of French. It is found that native speakers attend to the construction of the referent, whereas learners are more concerned with syntactic construction. (Contains 14 references.) (Author/LB)

Command of transitivity permutations in Hebrew, where a change in verb-argument syntax entails a change in verb morphology, were examined in 30 children aged 2, 3, and 8. Findings have implications for the development of derivational morphology, item-based versus class-based learning, and the impact of lexical productivity and language-particular…

This study compared the production of complex syntax by 16 older adults diagnosed with probable Alzheimer's disease and 25 age-matched control subjects. It found that although individuals diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease did not produce frank lexical or grammatical errors, they did find it difficult to access the "best fit" between meaning and…

This study examined nonstandard syntactic and morphological forms used by 45 poor, urban, 4- to 5.5-year-old African American children. Distributional analyses revealed three subgroups distinguished by the percentage frequencies of occurrence of utterances containing specific forms and by the predominant types used by each group. (Author)

Research is reported showing that children are lexically conservative in the domain of learning argument omissibility. Two studies (one observational case study, one experimental) show a relationship between the argument frames used in input and those used by child subjects. (Contains 38 references.) (Author/LB)

Discusses the design and use of the Computer Model for Language Acquisition (COMOLA), a computer program designed to analyze syntactic development in second-language learners by examining their oral utterances. Also compares COMOLA to the recently developed Computer-Aides Linguistic Analysis (COALA) program. (MDM)

Reexamines the work of earlier scholars on the circumstances accompanying the changes in the names of the days of the week. Syntactic changes as well as the Church's struggle to eradicate the names of the pagan divinities played a great role in effecting these changes. Dual designations, full forms, and condensed ones existed side by side in some…

This study examined the relationship between holistic judgements of oral proficiency and objective measures of syntactic maturity of 107 Chinese students of English as a Foreign Language. It found significant differences in objective measures of syntactic maturity and that demonstrated levels of syntactic maturity varied according to the task. (48…

Examines differences in language ability between normally achieving students and learning-disabled students with reading comprehension problems. Poor comprehending students differed from normal achievers for all language measures and in the manner that reader- and text-related variables predicted comprehension. Results supported the positive role…

Addressed three issues in a description of techniques used to study how people learn structured sequences. These are the content of what is learned, the role of conscious awareness in syntactic learning, and the role of limited-capacity processing or focal attention in syntactic learning. (Contains 86 references.) (Author)

Analyzes the use of language in two British and Australian secondary school textbooks and a corpus of written British English of one million words. Significant differences were found in the distribution of syntactic patterns in the two books, and these differences are discussed as evidence of the ideological stances expressed in the books.…

Investigates the degree to which children and adult readers use semantic and syntactic information sources to increase speed of word recognition and to increase speed of determining sentence meaningfulness. Finds three developmental differences in the speed of analyzing these sentences for words/nonwords versus meaningfulness/nonmeaningfulness.…

A two-year-old child and an eight-year-old bonobo exposed to spoken English and lexigrams from infancy were asked to respond to novel sentences. Both subjects comprehended novel requests and simple syntactic devices. The bonobo decoded the syntactic device of word recursion more accurately than the child; the child performed better than the bonobo…