This study documents and accounts for maintenance and change in dialectal features of Salvadoran Spanish in the United States, especially "voseo", as opposed to "tuteo", terms signifying the use of the second person singular familiar pronouns vos and tu , with their corresponding verb forms. It compares two distinct Salvadoran…

The central purpose of this three-paper dissertation was to explore the ability of school-age children with and without language-learning disabilities (LLD) to apply sound/word level structure knowledge when performing speaking, spelling, and reading tasks. Data came from a larger investigation that used stratified sampling to create two ability…

Two experiments and two corpus studies focus on homophone dominance in the spelling of regularly inflected verb forms, the phenomenon that the higher-frequency homophone causes more intrusion errors on the lower-frequency one than vice versa. Experiment 1 was a speeded dictation task focusing on the Dutch imperative, a verb form whose formation…

In many languages there are words that behave like lexical verbs and on the one hand and like functional categories expressing distinctions of tense, aspect, modality, etc. on the other. The grammatical status of such words is frequently controversial; while some authors treat them as belonging to one and the same grammatical category, others…

First written in 1986, prior to the many findings concerning the optionality of finiteness and the root infinitive phenomenon, this article attempts to extend the parameter-setting model of grammatical development to the acquisition of inflectional morphology. I propose that the Stem Parameter, which states that a stem is/is not a well-formed word…

The study reports the results of a masked priming experiment with morphologically complex Russian nouns. Participants performed a lexical decision task to a visual target that differed from its prime in one consonant. Three conditions were included: (1) "transparent," in which the prime was morphologically related to the target and contained the…

In three experiments we explored the mental representation of morphologically complex words in French. Subjects were asked to perform a gender decision task on morphologically complex words that were of the same gender as their base or not. We found that gender decisions were made more slowly for morphologically complex words made from a base with…

Arguments concerning the relative role of semantic and grammatical factors in word formation have proven to be a wedge issue in current debates over the nature of linguistic representation and processing. In the present paper, we re-examine claims by Ramscar [Ramscar, M. (2002). The role of meaning in inflection: Why the past tense does not…

The aim of this study was to uncover factors accounting for the ability of children with specific language impairment (SLI) to learn agreement morphemes in intervention. Twenty-five children with SLI who participated in a six-month intervention program focused on teaching third person singular -s or auxiliary "is"/"are"/"was" showed a wide range…

This study describes how young Spanish-speaking children become gradually more adept at encoding temporality using grammar and discourse skills in intra-conversational narratives. The research involved parallel case studies of two Spanish-speaking children followed longitudinally from ages two to three. Type/token frequencies of verb tense,…

The present study investigated the existence of a Japanese mental syllabary and units stored therein for speech production. Experiment 1 compared naming latencies between high and low initial mora frequencies using CVCVCV nonwords, indicating that nonwords with a high initial mora frequency were named faster than those with a low frequency initial…

Within linguistics, words with a complex internal structure are commonly assumed to be decomposed into their constituent morphemes (e.g., un-help-ful). Nevertheless, an ongoing debate concerns the brain structures that subserve this process. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, the present study varied the internal complexity of derived…

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…

Turkish as spoken in the Netherlands (NL-Turkish) sounds "different" (unconventional) to Turkish speakers in Turkey (TR-Turkish). We claim that this is due to structural contact-induced change that is, however, located within specific lexically complex units copied from Dutch. This article investigates structural change in NL-Turkish…

Limited vocabulary knowledge has been cited as a key factor in the literacy achievement gap, particularly for students with learning disabilities, students of color, and English-language learners. Recent authorities have recommended multipronged approaches to assist vocabulary growth in classrooms. In addition, authorities have called for…