It has been observed that persons with Cri du chat syndrome (CDCS) have poor language production. However, very few studies have addressed the question whether all aspects of language production are equally afflicted, or whether there are differences between for instance phonological and morphological abilities. The present study was aimed at…

Studies of copular forms are extremely relevant to issues in philosophy, psychology, and linguistics. Psychologists have recently argued that the most distinctive aspect of human language is its combinatorial nature (e.g., Gentner, 2003; Spelke, 2003). They argue that this linguistic component might be what separates human from animal cognition.…

International graduate students often face significant challenges with academic writing. These challenges create uncertainty about faculty members' roles as teachers of discipline-specific writing, especially in relation to the roles of writing specialists in other academic units. This qualitative case study explored faculty members' attitudes…

The Problem: The purpose of this study was to identify and analyze the information structure of native-English speaking (NES) ESOL teachers in giving explanations in a grammar class at an Intensive English Program (IEP) at a university in southern California Method: This mixed-method study employed a sequential-exploratory design. Six grammar…

The usage and disappearance of the Central Ibero-Romance future subjunctive have been extensively researched through Old Spanish texts. Studies on the future subjunctive as it evolved in the farther Western Ibero-Romance languages, represented by Galician and Portuguese, have been scarce, if not incomplete. This dissertation partially fills the…

The role of homophony in language change and in child morphological acquisition has often been made recourse to. Regarding the former it has been proposed that the threat of homophony can prevent a sound change from going to completion. With respect to the latter, it has been vaguely and contradictorily claimed that homophonous morphological…

A considerable body of empirical and theoretical research suggests that morphological structure governs the representation of words in memory and that many words are decomposed into morphological components in processing. The authors investigated an alternative approach in which morphology arises from the interaction of semantic and phonological…

This article focuses on the syntax of a number of subcategories of verb in French which are compatible with a following bare infinitive and which express various kinds of grammatical tense, mood, modality, aspect and voice, as well as such (more lexical?) notions as perception, causation and locomotion. The article starts by cataloguing a number…

Previous research has examined children's ability to add inflections to nonsense words. The current experiments were designed to determine whether children, ranging in age from 1 ; 9 to 2 ; 10 (N=34), could demonstrate productivity by dropping verbal inflections. In, children added "-ed" and "-ing" to novel stems, and dropped them from novel…

Lardiere (2003), in her reply to Lakshmanan and Selinker (2001), justifies the use of suppliance in obligatory contexts as a method of analysis in the investigation of the second language (L2) acquisition of past tense, and claims that such a method is characteristic of previous studies that have proposed the Aspect Hypothesis. It is argued here…

Speaking a word can be started faster when all the words in a given block share the initial portion (e.g., syllable) than when they do not (known as the form preparation effect). Two experiments employed the task to examine the role of morphemes in Chinese word production. In Experiment 1, the disyllabic target words were monomorphemic or…

The theory of syntactic bootstrapping proposes that children can use syntax to infer the meanings of words. This paper presents experimental evidence that children are also able to use word inflections to infer word reference. Twenty-four- and 30-month-olds were tested in a preferential looking experiment. Children were shown a pair of novel…

This paper reports on an experiment which examined the knowledge of verb placement by Japanese learners of English (JLEs). The results of two grammaticality judgement tasks indicated that JLEs acquire the unavailability of an NP-shift operation relatively early, but their judgements of sentences involving V-raising (i.e., illicit *SV-Adv-O word…

Background: Existing evidence suggests that young children with specific language impairment have unusual difficulty in detecting omissions of obligatory tense-marking morphemes, but little is known about adolescents' sensitivity to such violations. Aims: The study investigated whether limitations in receptive morphosyntax (as measured by…

There seem to be two kinds of nonconservers-those who think their response might change on another occasion and those who think their response would always be the same. After training in conservation, the former (called nonconservers without necessity) show no detectable gains in conservation, while the latter (called nonconservers with…