This study examined how French third (36) and fifth (36) graders used the morphosyntactic context when they spell morphologically complex words with homophonous suffixes (/a/). Participants had to spell adverbs (/a/ transcribed ent) and present participles (/a/ transcribed ant), contrasted on the basis of their frequency, in isolation or embedded…

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…

A well-known problem in the analysis of test and questionnaire data is that some item scores may be missing. Advanced methods for the imputation of missing data are available, such as multiple imputation under the multivariate normal model and imputation under the saturated logistic model (Schafer, 1997). Accompanying software was made available…

Written language requires prior knowledge of many foundation language skills. Students with language learning disabilities find it difficult to integrate language skills into academic writing assignments. Exceptional educators can teach foundation writing skills through certain underlying components of language, that is, phonology, morphology,…

Forty-four children (mean 3.8 years) were given three false belief, a working memory, and four language tasks (each designed to tap a different aspect of syntax or semantics), and were tested again 6 months later. Once the range of scores in the language and false belief tasks were equated, there was a bidirectional relation between language and…

Lidz, Waxman, and Freedman [Lidz, J., Waxman, S., & Freedman, J. (2003). What infants know about syntax but couldn't have learned: Evidence for syntactic structure at 18-months. "Cognition," 89, B65-B73.] argue that acquisition of the syntactic and semantic properties of anaphoric one in English relies on innate knowledge within the learner.…

A central issue in bilingual research concerns the extent to which linguistic representations in the two languages are processed independently of each other. This paper reports the results of an empirical study and a model stimulation, which provide evidence for the interactive view, which holds that processing is not independent. Specifically, a…

The purpose of this study was to examine the character identification strategies of Chinese children during their oral reading of a continuous text. Eighteen second graders' oral reading of a story, as well as an interview about their decoding strategies, were audiotaped and transcribed. The results generally converged with those of previous oral…

This article addresses the debate on the causes of variability in production of second language functional morphology. It reports a study on article production by first language (L1) Serbian/second language (L2) English learners and compares their behaviour to that of a Turkish learner of English, reported in Goad and White (2004). In particular,…

This study investigated the encoding of animate/inanimate distinctions in the pronominal systems of a variety of Bantu languages. Various encoding strategies are found to suggest that there is a strong syntactic opposition between animate and inanimate object markers in Bantu languages. Restricted positions and obligatory presence are particularly…

A study examined the idea that linguistic competence and linguistic performance may be initially dependent on a substrate of imagery. The study explored the ways in which four student interviewees' talk indicated the visual processes of thinking. The prompt used was: describe some aspect of daily life at the age of 9 or 10. The study reviewed…

An analysis of applicative constructions in Bantu languages proposes a typology of applicative structures, using examples from Ndendeule and Swahili. First, the basic facts about applicative constructions are presented, including those concerning morphology, meaning, and alternative expressions, and several arguments are posited. Primary objects…

A study analyzed the distribution of words in a three-million-word corpus of text from the "Wall Street Journal," in order to test a theory of the acquisition of word categories. The theory, an alternative to the semantic bootstrapping hypothesis, proposes that the child exploits multiple sources of cues (distributional, semantic, or…

The results of ongoing research on the acquisition of Irish as a first language are presented in this collection of four papers from a 1991 seminar and a fifth paper specially commissioned for this volume. The study of Irish syntax is of particular interest because of its contribution to the ongoing search for a Universal Grammar. The papers and…

This study focuses on the morphosyntactic aspects of Cantonese-English code-mixing as commonly spoken by bilinguals, most of whom are Cantonese. A corpus of Cantonese-English code-switching collected from informal conversations is analyzed in terms of structural properties, followed by a critique of the major constraints or principles that have…