Fikkert (1994) analyzed a large corpus of Dutch children's early language production, and found that they often add targetless syllables to their words in order to create bisyllabic feet. In this note we point out a methodological problem with that analysis: in an important number of cases, epenthetic vowels occur at places where grammatical…

This article explores variation in the use of the pronouns "nous" and "on" for first-person plural reference in a substantial corpus of French-language Internet chat discourse. The results indicate that "on" is nearly categorically preferred to "nous," which is in line with previous research on informal spoken French. A qualitative analysis of…

This paper discusses a problem in semantic analysis of modern standard Thai. The synchronically polysememic morpheme /cay/ has meanings approximately equivalent to English "heart, mind, spirit" and "breath." A purely descriptive approach to this form would require two separate dictionary entries for /cay/. An examination of the…

Are the linguistic forms that are memorized in the mental lexicon and those that are specified by the rules of grammar subserved by distinct neurocognitive systems or by a single computational system with relatively broad anatomic distribution? On a dual-system view, the productive -ed-suffixation of English regular past tense forms (e.g.,…

A previous study of 10 patients with Broca's aphasia demonstrated that the advantage for producing the past tense of irregular over regular verbs exhibited by these patients was eliminated when the two sets of past-tense forms were matched for phonological complexity (Bird, Lambon Ralph, Seidenberg, McClelland, & Patterson, 2003). The…

This study probes the effects of allomorphy on access to Arabic roots and word patterns in two cross-modal priming experiments. Experiment 1 used strong roots which undergo no allomorphy, and weak roots which undergo allomorphy and surface with only two of their three consonants in some derivations. Word pairs sharing a root morpheme prime each…

Morphemes have a powerful impact on the spellings of words in English. We report on two experiments examining young children's knowledge of the effect of suffix morphemes on spelling. In Experiment 1, 5- to 8-year-olds demonstrated awareness of the role of inflections, but not derivations in spelling. Experiment 2 examined whether children might…

This dissertation project examines the language contact situation of Chipilo, a Veneto-Spanish bilingual community of immigrant origin in central Mexico, focusing both on the social motivations for the sustained bilingualism observed and the linguistic outcomes in the Spanish of the community. Chipilo is a unique community in that Veneto, a…

Most linguistic studies of subject-verb agreement have thus far attempted to account for this phenomenon in terms of either syntax or semantics. Kim (2004) [Kim, J., 2004. Hybrid agreement in English. Linguistics 42 (6), 1105-1128] proposes a "hybrid analysis", which allows for a morphosyntactic agreement and a semantic agreement within the same…

Knowing the meanings of common root words, prefixes, and suffixes may help students read and spell the longer words they begin to run into in the upper elementary grades. This article describes how students can use the Kidspiration computer program to quickly and easily create word webs that illustrate the meanings of common root words and…

In this study we investigate the production of verb inflection in agrammatic aphasia. In a number of recent studies it has been argued that tense inflection is harder to produce for agrammatic individuals than agreement inflection. However, results are still inconclusive, at least for Dutch and German. Here, we report three experiments in which…

English plays an important role for the life of the people of East Timor. So it is studied from secondary to tertiary schools. However, the resources of English are not sufficiently available. Under the development concerns the conditions that are faced by both the educator and learners in English as a foreign language course at the university.…

Sixteen-year-olds with specific language impairment (SLI), nonspecific language impairment (NLI), and those showing typical language development (TD) responded to target words in sentences that were either grammatical or contained a grammatical error immediately before the target word. The TD participants showed the expected slower response times…

Phonological encoding is the process by which speakers retrieve phonemic segments for morphemes from memory and use the segments to assemble phonological representations of words to be spoken. When conversing in one language, bilingual speakers have to resist the temptation of encoding word forms using the phonological rules and representations of…