English uses three types of generic NPs: bare plurals ("Lions are dangerous"), definite singulars ("The lion is dangerous"), and indefinite singulars ("A lion is dangerous"). These three NP types are not interchangeable: definite singulars and bare plurals can have generic reference at the NP-level, while indefinite singulars are compatible only…

The scripts of 288 television episodes were analysed to determine the extent to which vocabulary reoccurs in television programs from the same subgenres and unrelated television programs from different genres. Episodes from two programs from each of the following three subgenres of the American drama genre: medical, spy/action, and criminal…

The study explored the different influences of roots and suffixes in reading aloud morphemic pseudowords (e.g., vetr-ezza, "glass-ness"). Previous work on adults showed a facilitating effect of both roots and suffixes on naming times. In the present study, pseudoword stimuli including roots and suffixes in different combinations were…

The current paper attempts to account for the formation of English middle sentences. Discussing a set of previous analyses on the construction under investigation we show, following the assumptions of Oosten(1986) and Iwata(1999), that English middle constructions should be divided into two types: generic middle constructions and non-generic…

In revisiting Bolozky's [Bolozky, Shmuel, 1979. "On the new imperative in colloquial Hebrew." "Hebrew Annual Review" 3, 17-24] and Bat-El's [Bat-El, Outi, 2002. "True truncation in colloquial Hebrew imperatives." "Language" 78(4), 651-683] analyses of colloquial Hebrew imperatives, the article argues for restricting Imperative Truncation to the…

A manual search paradigm explored the development of English singular-plural comprehension. After being shown a box into which they could reach but not see, infants heard verbal descriptions about the contents of the box (e.g., "There are some cars in the box" vs. "There is a car in the box)" and were then allowed to reach into the box. At 24…

This study examined compound awareness in relation to Chinese children's vocabulary acquisition and character reading. Two aspects of compound awareness were investigated: the ability to identify the head of a compound noun and the ability to construct a new compound word from familiar morphemes. The compound awareness tasks, along with rapid…

The Indo-European language family contains many "small words" with various adverbial meanings and functions, including preverbs. The term "preverb" is used to label any of a variety of modifying morphemes that form a close semantic unit with a verb, including both words and prefixes (Booij and Kemenade 2003). Some Indo-European languages not only…

This study examines the link between distributional patterns in the input and infants' acquisition of non-adjacent dependencies. In two Headturn Preference experiments, Dutch-learning 24-month-olds (but not 17-month-olds) were found to track the remote dependency between the definite article "het" and the diminutive suffix…

Conflicting reports of language ability in Williams syndrome (WS) are confusing and may hinder accurate clinical decisions with respect to therapeutic services and educational placements for children with WS.This longitudinal case study examined the acquisition of regular and irregular past tense verbs in a child with WS. The development of…

In our comments on Pacton and Deacon's discussion of children's spelling of morphemes we raise four issues: (1) whether the "timing" question should be about children's ages or about their psychological processes; (2) the crucial importance of individual differences in the study of the connections that people make between morphemes and spelling;…

Spoken verb tense use in three groups of Spanish speakers with expressive limitations, namely, children with specific language impairment, bilingual children with first language (L1) (Spanish) attrition and adults with agrammatism, was compared in order to examine the possible impact of conversational tense frequency on expressive production.…

Aim: The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of an integrated phoneme awareness/speech intervention in comparison to an alternating speech/morphosyntax intervention for specific areas targeted by the different interventions, as well as the extent of indirect gains in nontargeted areas. Method: A total of 30 children with co-occurring…

This study examined to what extent advanced and beginning readers, including dyslexic readers of Dutch, make use of morphological access units in the reading of polymorphemic words. Therefore, experiments were carried out in which the role of singular root form frequency in reading plural word forms was investigated in a lexical decision task with…

The optional use of morphology attested in second language learners has been attributed either to a representational deficit or to a "surface" problem with respect to the realization of inflectional affixes. In this article we contribute to this issue by providing empirical data from the early interlanguage of Greek learners of Turkish. Three…