The concept of language learning disability is discussed in terms of such language components as phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics; input and output dimensions of language performance; information processing; and the social construction of meaning. (DB)

Two experiments were performed on the ability of children and adults to understand and produce locative verbs. Results confirm that children tend to make syntactic errors with sentences containing "fill" and "empty," encoding the content argument as direct object. (33 references) (JL)

Analyzed longitudinal data from 28-year-old Cambodian man who, despite instruction in English-as-Second-Language and residence in English-speaking community, used form "has" for both possessives (PO) and existentials (EX). Shared semantic properties of PO/EX, together with syntactic, pragmatic, perceptual characteristics of native…

Students with (n=45) and without (n=60) mild mental retardation were compared on nine measures of syntactic complexity in writing at three grade levels (grades six, seven, and eight). Multivariate analysis of variance revealed significant differences for group but not for grade level or group by grade level. (Author/DB)

Debates the merits of the claim that "symbolic technologies push cognitive growth earlier and longer." The results of an assessment are presented that involved three adult male peasants (two literate, one nonliterate) living in rural China and their ability to recall the text of "The Lonesome Opossum." (25 references) (GLR)

Investigates a single linguistic universal that typifies the generative approach to grammar: morphological causativization. The study offers a predictive lexical analysis of causativization within the framework of Government/Binding theory, discusses syntactic and lexical analyses, and examines transitive verbs. Discussions concerning periphrastic…

Reports a case study of a British 2-year old that shows a stage in syntactic development without a subject agreement protection but with a tense phrase. A sharp contrast in use of verb forms suggests that the child had left the Optional Infinitive stage and entered a transitional stage, where the major development is that the status of the bare…

Reports on the results of a case study indicating that written language in general and journal writing in particular may be the preferred vehicle for syntactic acquisition of some adult learners. Five adult English-as-a-Second-Language learners, all illiterate in their first language, took part in the study. (Author/JL)

Describes a morphosyntactic feature of the Xining dialect that is unique among all Chinese dialects: that is, the use of a preposition to express ablative nominal relationships. (Author/VWL)

Explores the acquisition process of relative clauses in Japanese and Korean. Examines the issue of whether Korean "kes" and Japanese "no" found in Korean and Japanese relative clauses are each a complementizer or a head noun.(Author/VWL)

Explores two Mandarin-speaking children's ability to refer to the past in mother-child conversation. The approach encompasses morphosyntactic, semantic, and discourse-pragmatic perspectives. Results show that the children tend to refer to immediate past spontaneously, but rely heavily on elicitation when referring to earlier past. (Author/VWL)

Discusses West Africanisms in Limonese Creole (LC), an English based creole language spoken in Costa Rica that shows substrate influence from the Kwa languages of West Africa, in particular from Akan (spoken in Ghana). Substrate influence is demonstrated through a comparison of LC and Akan morphophonology, morphosyntax, and lexicon. (Author/VWL)

Language characteristics of 11 children (ages 6-8) with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and 11 typically developing children were compared for semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic language skills. Findings indicated no differences on receptive vocabulary, but children with ADHD performed worse on tests of expressive speech and…

Investigated the relationship between grammatical knowledge and reading ability in third grade good and poor readers. Two aspects of grammar--binding and control--were assessed to determine whether poor readers had syntactic deficits. Interpretations were assessed through a sentence-picture matching task in which picture depictions of all possible…

Argues that functional categories instantiated in the learners' first language (L1) transfer to the initial state of second language syntactic development. On the basis of Zulu interlanguage data on acquisition of the obligatory declarative complementizer "ukuthi" (that) by English native speakers, argues that Comp contains a null…