We explored children's early interpretation of numerals and linguistic number marking, in order to test the hypothesis (e.g., Carey (2004). Bootstrapping and the origin of concepts. "Daedalus", 59-68) that children's initial distinction between "one" and other numerals (i.e., "two," "three," etc.) is bootstrapped from a prior distinction between…

This study aimed to isolate the effects of the two input activities in Processing Instruction: referential activities, which force learners to focus on a form and its meaning, and affective activities, which contain exemplars of the target form and require learners to process sentence meaning. One hundred and twenty 12-year-old Taiwanese learners…

Informal language sampling is ubiquitous in the study of developing grammatical abilities in children with and without delayed language, including study of grammatical abilities in the area of finite verb production. Finite verbs are particularly important to assess as they appear to be the grammatical morphemes most vulnerable to error in the…

Substantial neurobiological data indicate that the dominant cortical region for printed-word recognition shifts from a temporo-parietal (dorsal) to an occipito-temporal (ventral) locus with increasing recognition experience. The circuits also have different characteristic speeds of response and word preferences. Previous evidence suggested that…

Previous studies suggest that different neural and functional mechanisms are involved in the analysis of irregular ("caught") and regular ("filled") past tense forms in English. In particular, the comprehension and production of regular forms is argued to require processes of morpho-phonological assembly and disassembly, analysing these forms into…

This article investigates how linguistic expressions of time--in particular, temporal adverbs and verb tense morphemes--are used to establish temporal reference at the level of brain physiology. First, a formal semantic analysis of tense and temporal adverbs is outlined. It is argued that computing temporal reference amounts to solving a…

Background: Current models of evidence-based practice marginalize and even silence the voices of those who are the potential beneficiaries of assessment and intervention. These missing voices can be found in the reflections of clients on their own life-world experiences. Aims: This paper examines how voices from the life-world are silenced in…

We provide an empirically updated Skinnerian-based account of verbal behavior development, describing how the speaker-as-own-listener capability in children (the capability of children to behave as speaker and listener within their own skin) accrues and how it is pivotal to becoming verbal. The theory grew from (a) findings in experiments with…

Previous research on event-related potentials (ERPs) on second language processing has revealed a great degree of plasticity in brain mechanisms of adult language learners. Studies with natural and artificial languages show that the N400 as well as the P600 component appear in learners after sufficient training. The present experiment tests if and…

This paper presents findings of an acoustic phonetic analysis of vowels produced by speakers of English as a second language from northern India. The monophthongal vowel productions of a group of male speakers of Hindi and male speakers of Punjabi were recorded, and acoustic phonetic analyses of vowel formant frequencies and vowel duration were…

This paper explores tense and agreement marking in the spontaneous production of verbs in Arabic-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI) and two groups of typically developing children: one group matched for mean length of utterance, and the other group matched for age. The special characteristics of Arabic such as its rich bound…

Children with word finding difficulties (CwWFDs) are slower and less accurate at naming monomorphemic words than typically developing children (Dockrell, Messer & George, 2001), but their difficulty in naming morphologically complex words has not yet been investigated. One aim of this paper was to identify whether CwWFDs are similar to typically…

Three experiments demonstrate gender congruency effects (i.e., naming times of a picture are faster when the name of the target picture and a distractor noun are gender congruent) in Czech. In the first experiment, subjects named the pictures by producing gender-marked demonstrative pronouns and a noun. In the second and third experiments,…

Previous research has suggested that children in the early grades of primary school do not have much awareness of morphemes. In this study, a priming paradigm was used to try to detect early signs of morphological representation of stems through a spelling task presented to Portuguese children (N = 805; age range 6-9 years). Primes shared the stem…

The spellings of many English words follow a principle of morphological constancy. For example, "musician" includes the c of "music", even though the pronunciation of this letter changes. With other words, such as "explanation" and "explain", the spellings of morphemes are not retained when affixes are…