This article provides experimental evidence for the claim in Hayes (2004) and McCarthy (1998) that language learners are biased to assume that morphological paradigms should be phonologically-uniform--that is, that derived words should retain all the phonological properties of their bases. The evidence comes from an artificial language…

This study investigates the ability of a group of eight Greek-speaking adolescents with Down Syndrome (DS) (aged 12.1-18.7) to handle the perfective past tense using an acceptability judgement task. The performance of the DS participants was compared with that of 16 typically-developing children whose chronological age was matched with the mental…

A boundary change manipulation was implemented within a monomorphemic word (e.g., "fountaom" as a preview for "fountain"), where parallel processing should occur given adequate visual acuity, and within an unspaced compound ("bathroan" as a preview for "bathroom"), where some serial processing of the constituents is likely. Consistent with that…

Purpose: The author examined the influence of sentence type, clause order, and verb transitivity on the accuracy of children's past tense productions. All groups of children, but especially children with specific language impairment (SLI), were predicted to decrease accuracy as linguistic complexity increased. Method: The author elicited past…

This dissertation has two inter-related goals: (i) to describe and provide novel analyses of three types of important and difficult phenomena within Amharic DPs and (ii) to explore the properties of the syntax-morphology interface. The core phenomena explicated are the unusual distribution of the definite marker, the gender system (which relies…

Purpose: Children variably produce grammatical morphemes at early stages of development, often omitting inflectional morphemes in obligatory contexts. This has typically been attributed to immature syntactic or semantic representations. In this study, the authors investigated the hypothesis that children's variable production of the 3rd person…

The present study investigated the impact of textual input enhancement and explicit rule presentation on 93 Iranian EFL learners' intake of simple past tense. Three intact general English classes in Tabriz Azad University were randomly assigned to: 1) a control group; 2) a TIE group; and 3) a TIE plus explicit rule presentation group. All…

This study attempts to examine the use of English modals in terms of their frequency and functions. For this purpose, Form 4 and College students' argumentative compositions were extracted from the Malaysian Corpus of Students' Argumentative Writing (MCSAW). In order to analyze the data, this study employed discourse analysis and some descriptive…

This study was conducted to investigate the influence of Colloquial Jordanian Arabic upon the use of negation and the definite article in English. The sample of the study consisted of 100 male and 100 female Jordanian 10th graders in the academic year 2011-2012. The students were randomly selected from public schools in the region of Karak-Jordan.…

Thirty-three students of fourth semester German at the University of Kansas participated in the study which sought to investigate whether focused written corrective feedback (WCF) promoted the acquisition of the German case morphology over the course of a semester. Participants received teacher WCF on five two-draft essay assignments under three…

In this article we discuss the specifics of reading fluency and provide suggestions for identifying when reading is fluent and when it is not. We then discuss the important role that reading fluency plays in the attainment of literacy achievement and briefly review research results that highlight the relationship between fluency and comprehension.…

To effectively teach university lecturers or students to write a good research article (RA) abstract for publication in international journals, instructors need to know the present characteristics of abstracts written published in such journals. This study examines the discourse structure and linguistic features of RA abstracts written in English…

This study compared negative and positive evidence in adult word learning, predicting that adults would learn more forms following negative evidence. Ninety-two native English speakers (32 men and 60 women [M[subscript age] = 20.38 years, SD = 2.80]), learned nonsense nouns and verbs provided within English frames. Later, participants produced…

Can transfer occur in child bilingual syntax when surface overlap does not involve the syntax-pragmatics interface? Twenty-three Spanish/English bilingual children participated in an elicited imitation study of clitic placement in Spanish restructuring contexts, where variable word order is not associated with pragmatic or semantic factors.…

The present paper reports on a study that investigated the role of procedural and declarative memory in the acquisition of Finnish past tense morphology. Two competing models were tested. Ullman's (2004) declarative/procedural model predicts that procedural memory supports the acquisition of regular morphology, whereas declarative memory supports…