The purposes of this 11th-grade unit on language are to survey the most important grammatical elements of the English sentence and to synthesize grammatical principles previously learned in grades 7-10 of the curriculum. The unit moves from discussions of the simplest grammatical elements to the more complex: Bound and free morphemes are defined,…

This article argues for a set of ordered rules for morphophonemic alternations in the N-class in Swahili, positing /n/ as the class prefix and an abstract segment as stem initial in certain words. The rules are: (1) liquids and the labial glide become corresponding voiced stops; (2) the nasal prefix assimilates in coronality and backness, and…

Participants in a seminar series in second language acquisition held at Harvard University discussed three papers by Dulay and Burt ("Goofing: An Indicator of Children's Second Language Learning Strategies,""Should We Teach Children Syntax?", "Natural Sequences in Child Second Language Acquisition"), and developed…

The technique to be described here was developed to meet the need for a language production measure. It samples a variety of morphemic and syntactic patterns, and avoids the problems of imitation and of free speech analysis. The production test is administered in a sentence-completion format. A very brief incomplete story is told by the examiner…

This paper cites the inadequacy of transformational generative grammar theories in their attempts to describe the meaning of a given sentence. The author sees the specification of meaning involving the recovery of the particular section or sections of the world model communicated or represented by the sentence. As a corollary, the author argues…

This document provides a description of the Foochow dialect of Chinese. Introductory remarks concern the geographical area of the dialect and previous analysis. The phonological description includes statements on syllable structure, initial consonants, finals, tones, changed tones, combinations of initials, finals, and tones, and syllables in…

This document provides a description of the Tai-shan dialect of Chinese. Maps illustrate the area where the dialect is spoken, and introductory remarks concern previous study of the dialect, sources of current information, and relationship to other dialects. The phonological description provides information on syllable structure, initials, finals,…

A definition of bilingualism can include speakers of different languages as well as those who speak several dialects or several sub-varieties of dialects in the same language. Most speakers are able to practice code-switching, whether it is from language to language or dialect to dialect, and the processes involved in such a capability may be the…

Offers a model for research in second language acquisition. The model is based on implicational analysis and attempts to account for individuals and groups, systematicity and variability. An analysis of the use of grammatical morphemes by Spanish-speaking students of English illustrates the model. (Author/AM)

Authors present a critical, historical overview of research on second-language acquisition. Outlines four analytical approaches--contrastive, error, performance, and discourse analysis--traces the shifts among these approaches, and demonstrates the advantages and disadvantages of each. Also shows how the different approaches reflect changing…

Describes the presence of a phonological selection strategy and consonant harmony rule in one child's developing phonological system. Evidence suggests that this constant harmony constraint operated across morpheme boundaries, causing a delay in the onset of two-word utterances and influencing the selection of words that could occur in word…

A microgenetic approach to studying grammatical morpheme learning uses longitudinal data from two children learning English in different ways. Eight general attributes of morphological systems are proposed that will promote or inhibit the emergence of filler syllables during development. (Contains 86 references.) (Author/LB)

Three experiments used the differential frequency effect as a diagnostic tool to investigate the mental representation of disyllabic compound words in Mandarin Chinese. The results indicated that, when both word frequency and morpheme frequency were held constant, high-frequency first syllables slowed responses to real words. (41 references) (MDM)

The effects of intonation morphemes on the processing of simple reversible sentences containing a dislocated element were studied using synthetic speech stimuli. Both child and adult subjects processed the sentences better when they retained standard subject-verb-object order, suggesting that the morphemes serve as processing instructions.…

Argues that cross-morpheme and cross-word syllabification in the WEAVER model of speech production point to the need to deal with flexibility of syllable membership and pose difficulty to a memory-based approach but not to WEAVER. The study reviews empirical support for the form of syllabification in WEAVER and reports an experiment on…