Outlines the structural pattern of exclamative clauses in Paduan. Because of the close similarity between exclamative and interrogative clauses in this language, tests are developed for distinguishing these two clause types. A range of exclamative structures is then presented. (Author/VWL)

In this study, seven children with specific language impairment (SLI) and speech deficits were matched with same age peers and evaluated for iambic (weak-strong) and trochaic (strong-weak) prosodic speech forms. Findings indicated that children with SLI and speech deficits show less mature segmental and speech motor systems, as well as decreased…

Traditional syntactic accounts of verb phrase ellipsis (e.g., ''Jason laughed. Sam did [ ] too.'') categorize as ungrammatical many sentences that language users find acceptable (they ''undergenerate''); semantic accounts overgenerate. We propose that a processing theory, together with a syntactic account, does a better job of describing and…

We tested the effect of local lexical ambiguities while manipulating the type of prosodic boundary at which the ambiguity occurred, using French sentences and participants. We observed delayed lexical access when a local lexical ambiguity occurred within a phonological phrase (consistent with previous research; e.g., '[un chat grincheux],'…

A think-aloud method was used to examine the content of information available to working memory during narrative comprehension in a CHI population. Twenty severe CHI participants (>1 year post-injury) and 20 controls talked aloud after they read each sentence of story narratives. Trabasso and Magliano's (1996a) verbal protocol analysis was then…

Researchers studying science communication often examine how texts addressed to different audiences contribute to the formation of knowledge on a given issue. This article examines how arguments on scientific issues travel from text to text by considering how certain figures of speech persist from version to version. It uses a specialized genre of…

The present experiments investigate the influence of modifier relation frequency and discourse context on the interpretation of novel noun-noun phrases (as measured by both the ease of interpretation and the types of interpretations that are provided). We assess whether people access knowledge about the relations with which the modifier is…

Two experiments examined the learning of form-meaning connections under conditions where the relevant forms were noticed but the critical aspects of meaning were not. Miniature noun class systems were employed, and the participants were told that the choice of determiner in noun phrases depended on whether the object was "near" or "far" from the…

Recently, there has been increased attention to the development of complex syntax by children with language disorder. An example is the work of Schuele and Nicholls and Schuele and Tolbert who describe the acquisition of relative clauses by a group of children with SLI. The current paper presents data from 66 children with language impairment,…

This lesson uses a text about the houseboats of Kashmir to give students practice with descriptions, compound words, and participles. The lesson plan could be adapted to tourist destinations familiar to the students. Students are asked to write a description of their homes and create a tourism brochure for their own cities or towns.

The purposes of this study are to test whether the processing of subject relative (SR) clauses is easier than that of object relative (OR) clauses in Turkish and to investigate whether the comprehension of SRs can be better explained by the linear distance hypothesis or structural distance hypothesis (SDH). The question is examined in two groups…

Findings from a longitudinal study of bilingual children acquiring Cantonese and English pose a challenge to the noun phrase accessibility hierarchy (NPAH; Keenan & Comrie, 1977), which predicts that object relatives should not be acquired before subject relatives. In the children's Cantonese, object relatives emerged earlier than or…

The word length effect has been a central feature of theorising about immediate memory. The notion that short-term memory traces rapidly decay unless refreshed by rehearsal is based primarily upon the finding that serial recall for short words is better than that for long words. The decay account of the word length effect has come under pressure…

Educational leaders need to ask themselves how it is possible that nearly 40% of 329,969 Texas fourth grade students are reading below grade level? With accountability standards rising, how does any school with an at-risk population produce fluent readers and in turn master grade level expectations? Scholars agree that meaning derives from…

A sentence such as "I am going to find the store" may be reduced to "I[ma]find the store." This reduction consists of a reduction of the auxiliary, changing "I am" to "I'm," and an adjunction of infinitival "to" onto "going" to derive "gonna." From there, "gonna" is…