Explores the development of 280 students across 7 grades in spelling and word knowledge as well as their pattern of use of lower- to higher-order strategies in their attempts to spell words, write derivations, and display syntactic knowledge. Older students gradually make less use of lower-order strategies in spelling, writing derivations, and in…

This paper discusses the parameters of discourse topic management in terms of a multidimensional model of topic coherence; interaction between these parameters and linguistic and cognitive knowledge; effects of discourse, linguistic, and cognitive level difficulties on topic parameters; a method of assessment across all parameters and knowledge…

A study of two year olds investigated the nature and development of children's early productivity with verb-argument structure and verb morphology. Results indicated that the children showed no signs of productive verb morphology, but they did use newly learned verbs in some creative ways involving nounlike uses and the appending of locatives.…

Many sociolinguistic studies validate the importance of the relationship among social variables that satisfactorily explain the correlation between linguistic and social phenomena. The intersection of sex, sociocultural level, and age initiates syntactic change that first appears in the vernacular and progresses to the accepted standard. (52…

Forty children (ages 5-18) with mild to severe hearing losses were administered a battery of speech and language tasks. Misarticulation, syntactic, and pragmatic errors indicated a consistent pattern of oral communication behavior that reflects the reduction of acoustic input such children experience. (Author/DB)

Investigates the factors that constrain and promote the selection of noun compound types in spoken and written Hebrew. Three types of data were examined, one spoken and two written. Lexical, semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic analyses revealed that construct-state compounds are the default form for expressing relations. (55 references) (Author)

Discusses the experiences of a Malaysian student studying Spanish as a Second Language in an all-female Irish secondary school, focusing on common difficulties encountered by Asian students of Romance languages. It is argued that the teaching of Romance languages often unfairly presupposes a knowledge of Latin or French on the part of learners.…

Two experiments with native Japanese-speaking English majors are reported that explored the absolute and relative effectiveness of syntactic simplification and repetition on listening comprehension. Results of both experiments indicate that syntactic simplification is an aid to comprehension. (seven references) (Author/LB)

Discusses research that gathered language samples via videotape recordings from 2 Italian children (one upper class, the other lower class) from the age of 18 months to 36 months, and then analyzes the data to determine the development of morphology and syntax in these children. (19 references) (CFM)

Tested comprehension of syntactic structures by presenting each structure with both plausible and implausible content. Results revealed that cognitive nonlinguistic factors were important for comprehension and that errors and reaction time increased with age. The minimal contribution of neuropsychological factors to this decline suggests that the…

Describes SHRIF, a System for Heuristic Retrieval of Information and Facts, and the medical knowledge base that was used in its development. Highlights include design decisions; the user-machine interface, including the language processor; and the organization of the knowledge base in an artificial intelligence (AI) project like this one. (57…

Fourteen matched pairs of German-speaking and English-speaking children were tested for their knowledge of grammatical morphology and expressive vocabulary. The finding that the German-speaking children earned higher scores than did the English-speaking children adds to the literature that documents language-specific sensitivity to particular…

Briefly describes a program that sought to improve the written English skills of deaf adolescents' whose first language was American Sign Language, focusing on first-language skills, metalinguistic skills, translating skills, lexical matching across languages, translation of syntactical structures, and recognition of the importance of the…

To test to what extent children are aware of the differences between closed-class and open-class words, 104 children aged 3 to 5 years participated in a sentence repetition task. Children were more likely to repeat sentences correctly when the nonsense words functioned in open-class rather than in closed-class contexts. (Contains 20 references.)…

Semiotics can be a useful tool for analysis in language learning situations. This is particularly true for delineating student comprehension and the familiarity/strangeness aspects of discourse or texts. Use of semiotics can help differentiate the problems facing learners of French as a native language from those facing learners of French as a…