Late talkers with normal receptive language were compared with typically developing peers at ages 3 and 4 on grammatical suppliance during speech samples. At age 4, "late bloomers" did not differ from typically developing children, but late talkers with "continuing delay" differed on several grammatical variables. Findings are discussed in terms…

Examines Krashen's (1977) theory that postulates a distinction between language acquisition and language learning, reviewing recent studies on morpheme order, code-focused instruction, and grammatical rules that support the theory. Contrary to what has been claimed, the theory is not insulated against attempts to disconfirm it. (87 references)…

Applies prototype theory to the question of how to understand the concept of polysyllabic morphemes in Chinese. Analysis reveals that, because there is considerable disagreement on whether particular examples are in fact members this category, the traditional view that membership is an either/or matter is not accurate. (39 references) (MDM)

Twenty-five preschool children with specific language impairment and 25 controls were evaluated on generalization of trained bound morphemes to untrained vocabulary stems, in 2 training conditions: explicit, trainer verbalization of the affixation "rule" and an "implicit rule" condition. Findings indicated that explicit presentation of…

Details six major research findings regarding second-language acquisition, including transitional stages for acquiring syntax; fixed-order emergence of grammatical morphemes; language acquisition progress from unmarked to marked elements; first-language influence; rule-governed learner output; and learner access to input. (27 references) (CB)

The typology of planned languages, the number of such linguistic projects, and the most commonly used morphemes for these created languages are discussed. A total of 11 morpheme types are identified. (14 references) (Author/LB)

Two experiments examined young children's sensitivity to linguistic contexts in which particular function morphemes occur. Results showed that children who did not produce articles in spontaneous speech were able to distinguish between sentences, verbally presented in picture identification tasks, that contained grammatical articles and those that…

Hebrew words are composed of two interwoven morphemes: a triconsonantal root and a word pattern. Two experiments examined the effect of the root morpheme on word identification by assessing parafoveal preview benefit effects. Although the information of the preview was not consciously perceived, preview of the root's letters facilitated both…

Examines two issues concerning the acquisition of grammatical morphemes: (1) How is the acquisition of grammatical morphemes influenced by prosodic and phonological characteristics of the language being learned? and (2) What sorts of prosodic and phonological properties do grammatical morphemes have that might aid children in applying particular…

Grammaticalization is often regarded in the literature as a distinct process requiring explanatory machinery unique to its own domain. Argues, on the contrary, that grammaticalization is simply a cover term for certain syntactic, semantic, and phonetic changes, all of which apply independently of each other. (Author/VWL)

Examines bilingual language development of young Korean-American children with respect to acquisition of English grammatical morphemes and different plural marking systems of Korean and English. Addresses whether first and second language (L1, L2) learners acquire grammatical features of a given language in the same sequence and whether L2…

The study sought to examine the effect of lexical aspect and narrative discourse structure on the pattern of acquisition and use of English verbal morphology exhibited by creole-speaking students. Findings indicated that the emergent pattern of morphology in the creole participants' written interlanguage appeared to be influenced not only by…

N.O. Schiller and A. Caramazza (2003) and A. Costa, D. Kovacic, E. Fedorenko, and A. Caramazza (2003) have argued that the processing of freestanding gender-marked morphemes (e.g., determiners) and bound gender-marked morphemes (e.g., adjective suffixes) during syntactic encoding in speech production follows distinct principles, with only…

Grammatical measures that distinguish language differences from language disorders in bilingual children are scarce. This study examined English past tense morphology in sequential bilingual Spanish/English-speaking children, age 7;0-9;0 (years;months). Twelve bilingual children with language impairment (LI) or history of LI and 15 typically…

Overlaps in form and meaning between morphologically related words have led to ambiguities in interpreting priming effects in studies of lexical organization. In Semitic languages like Arabic, however, linguistic analysis proposes that one of the three component morphemes of a surface word is the CV-Skeleton, an abstract prosodic unit coding the…