Explores the relation between gender and language use in Japanese preschool children. Gender-based differences in Japanese include phonological, lexical, and morphosyntactical differences, as well as differences in conversational style. Data come from monthly naturalistic observations of 24 monolingual Japanese boys and girls engaged in same-sex…

A study of Hans Christian Andersen's diaries from age 20 to age 70 found that his mean error spelling percentages are equal to contemporaries, but between 2 and 15 times lower than individuals with dyslexia. A structural analysis indicates that the proportion of plausible/implausible errors match those of normal achievers. (Contains references.)…

This study documents the sensitivity of English-French interlanguage to the process-result distinction with respect to the licensing of multiple postnominal genitives, despite a lack of direct positive or negative evidence for this distinction in the input. Documentation argues that the Universal Grammar-governed map between syntactic structures…

This article discusses preliminary research that found that more than 90 percent of sentences written by children or for children contain verbs from 1 of 13 verb semantic-syntactic subsets. A strategy for assessing a child's knowledge of verbs from each subset is described, along with an assessment protocol. (Contains references.) (Author/CR)

Focuses on syntactic regularities that underlie language alternations in Spanish-English bilingual speech, and the methodologies that may prove most reliable and informative in the exploration of this focus. Findings attest to the validity of the methodologies and of the elicited data. (Author/VWL)

The adverbial phrase "a lo mejor" (at best) does not take the subjunctive, although other adverbial expressions of possibility may be followed by either indicative or subjunctive. Examines statements co-occurring with "a lo mejor" from the viewpoint of statement and mood, taking into account communicative discourse function. The study shows that…

Provides an analysis of the frequency of verbs and their syntactic requirements in "Interchange" (Richards et al., 1991), a popular series of textbooks for English as a Second Language (ESL). A corpus analysis of "Interchange" suggests that ESL materials may underrepresent some of the verb classes that are known to cause learners difficulty.…

Investigated the first verbs to participate in verb-object and subject-verb-object combinations and the temporal parameters of the spread of these combinations over different verbs, observing longitudinally young children acquiring English and Hebrew. Results indicated that the more verbs children already knew to combine in a certain pattern, the…

Addresses the relationship in second language acquisition (SLA) research between theory and data. Suggests a potential problem for the field of SLA; a lessening rigor in data analysis where theory moves more into focus. Documents how the problem manifests itself in a specific area of research in SLA--syntax and morphology--then discusses possible…

A "hippocampal amnesiac" (H.M.) and memory-normal controls of similar age, background, intelligence, and education read novel sentences aloud in tasks where fast and accurate reading was or was not the primary goal. H.M produced more misreadings than normal and cerebellar controls, usually without self-correction. Results support a theoretical…

This study examined changes in the complex syntax production of 85 African American preschoolers and the role of child (gender, age, African American English) and family (home environment) factors. Age, gender, and home environment effects were found for the amount of complex language used. African American English was not related to amount of…

Syntactic priming studies demonstrate that exposure to a particular syntactic structure leads speakers to reproduce the same structure in subsequent utterances. Explanations for this phenomenon rely on either the retrieval of morphosyntactic features associated with the verb in the prime sentence or the preservation of the mapping between message…

The authors evaluated the roles of auditory-verbal short-term memory, visual short-term memory, and group membership in predicting language comprehension, as measured by an experimental sentence comprehension task (SCT) and the Test for Auditory Comprehension of Language--Third Edition (TACL-3; E. Carrow-Woolfolk, 1999) in 38 participants: 19 with…

The authors investigated the role of syntax in verb learning in Mandarin Chinese, which allows pervasive ellipsis of noun arguments. Two questions were investigated using the Beijing corpus on CHILDES: (a) Does the input to young children manifest syntactic-semantic correspondences as needed for acquiring verb meanings? (b) Are verbs presented in…

Using experimental data from adult and child non-native language acquirers (L2ers), this paper addresses "interface issues" in language acquisition in two different ways. First, it examines the acquisition of direct object scrambling in Dutch, a phenomenon which involves the interaction of at least two different modules of language, i.e., syntax…