Four experiments investigated 4-year-olds' understanding of adjective-noun compositionality and their sensitivity to statistics when interpreting scalar adjectives. In Experiments 1 and 2, children selected "tall" and "short" items from 9 novel objects called "pimwits" (1-9 in. in height) or from this array plus 4 taller or shorter distractor…

This dissertation tests a grammatical structure, differential object marking (DOM), which is particularly difficult for L2 learners to acquire. DOM is a phenomenon in which some direct objects are morphologically marked to distinguish them from subjects (Comrie, 1979). In Spanish, animate and specific direct objects are marked with the preposition…

Utilizing the methodology of Conversation Analysis (CA), this study examines teaching moments observed in free conversations by pairs of Japanese and American friends. CA's detailed turn-by-turn analysis reveals that teaching of vocabulary, idioms, and culture occurs when native speakers orient to the non-nativeness of the other speakers.…

This thesis investigates the variation between null and overt pronouns in subject position in Catalan, a null subject language. I argue that null and overt subject pronouns are two resources that speakers efficiently deploy to signal their intended interpretation regarding antecedent choice or semantic meaning, and that communicative agents…

Demonstratives have traditionally been analyzed as "pointing words" whose primary function is to indicate relative spatial or temporal distance of a referent from speech participants. Recent research argues that the meaning of demonstratives is not limited to spatial distance and has given alternative accounts for the use of…

The purpose of the present investigation was to assess longitudinal word- and sentence-level measures of stuttering in young children. Participants included 12 stuttering and non-stuttering children between 36 and 71 months of age at an initial visit who exhibited a range of stuttering rates. Parent-child spontaneous speech samples were obtained…

This study examined the effects of the perceived cause of stuttering on perceptions of persons who stutter (PWS) using a 7-item social distance scale, a 25-item adjective pair scale and a 2-item visual analogue scale. Two hundred and four university students rated vignettes which varied on describing a PWS with different causalities for stuttering…

This study examines Lithuanian children's acquisition of gender agreement using an elicited production task. Lithuanian is a richly inflected Baltic language, with two genders and seven cases. Younger (N = 24, mean 3 ; 1, 2 ; 5-3 ; 8) and older (N = 24, mean 6 ; 3, 5 ; 6-6 ; 9) children were shown pictures of animals and asked to describe them…

How do Turkish children differ from adults in sensitivity to the commonality of their partner's perspective with their own in producing referential language? Fifteen five- to six-year-olds, 15 nine- to ten-year-olds and 15 adults were asked to tell a confederate to pick up an object across three conditions: the common ground condition, in which…

Before they are three years old, most children have started to build coherent discourse. This article focuses on one important linguistic device children have to learn: connectives. The main questions are: Do connectives emerge in a fixed order? And if so, how can this order be explained? In line with Bloom "et al." (1980) we propose to explain…

Word finding difficulties in children are typically characterized by search behaviours such as silence, circumlocution, repetition, and empty words. Yet, how children's word searches are constructed (including gesture, gaze, and prosody) and the actions accomplished during interaction have not yet been researched. In this study, 8-year-old Ciara…

This study investigated the technical adequacy of curriculum-based measures of written expression (CBM-W) in terms of writing prompts and scoring methods for deaf and hard-of-hearing students. Twenty-two students at the secondary school-level completed 3-min essays within two weeks, which were scored for nine existing and alternative…

The central question underlying this study revolves around how children process co-reference relationships--such as those evidenced by pronouns ("him") and reflexives ("himself")--and how a slowed rate of speech input may critically affect this process. Previous studies of child language processing have demonstrated that typical language…

This paper reports the results of three studies examining comprehension and real-time processing of pronominal (Experiment 1) and Wh-movement (Experiments 2 and 3) structures in agrammatic and unimpaired speakers using eyetracking. We asked the following questions: (a) Is off-line comprehension of these constructions impaired in agrammatic…

We investigated probabilistic cues to grammatical category (noun vs. verb) in English orthography. These cues are located in both the beginnings and endings of words--as identified in our large-scale corpus analysis. Experiment 1 tested participants' sensitivity to beginning and ending cues while making speeded grammatical classifications.…