Shows that incorporation of units for syllable CV structures in a connectionist model of phonological encoding enables explanation of empirical patterns of speech errors. The model accounts for the finding of a bias toward additions of segments. Corpus analysis in Dutch and Spanish showed an addition bias in both languages. Showed that in…

Analyzed correct wh-question production and subject-auxiliary inversion errors in one child's wh-question data. Argues that two current movement rule accounts cannot explain patterning of early wh-questions. Data can be explained by the child's knowledge of particular lexically-specific wh-word+auxiliary combinations, and inversion and universion…

Compares explanations of letter-detection errors in the word "the" based on the unitization hypothesis (errors occur because the word is processed as a whole unit, and lower order processes are not completed) to the structural model of reading (errors occur because the syntactic function of the word pulls attention away from this word).…

Many current generativist theorists suggest that young children possess the grammatical principles of inversion required for question formation but make errors because they find it difficult to learn language-specific rules about how inversion applies. The present study analyzed longitudinal spontaneous sampled data from twelve 2-3-year-old…

Although there is extensive documentation of the morphological limitations of children with specific language impairment (SLI), few studies have reported on complex syntax acquisition in children with SLI. This case study examined the development of complex syntax in a child with SLI between 3 and 7 years. Twelve conversational samples were…

Five experiments, using a subject-verb agreement error elicitation procedure, investigated syntactic planning processes in production. The experiments examined the influence of semantic integration--the degree to which phrases are tightly linked at the conceptual level--and contrasted two accounts of planning: serial stack-based systems and…

This paper reports the results of a normative study of the 60-item version of the Boston Naming Test (BNT) in a group of 371 native Dutch-speaking Flemish children between the ages of 6 and 12 years. Analysis of test results revealed that BNT performance was significantly affected by age and gender. The gathered norms were shown to be…

This article describes activities that promote students' understanding of equation solving through analyzing and correcting student work. (Contains 5 figures.)

How do English-speaking children inflect nouns for plurality and verbs for the past tense? We assess theoretical answers to this question by considering errors of omission, which occur when children produce a stem in place of its inflected counterpart (e.g., saying "dress" to refer to 5 dresses). A total of 307 children (aged 3;11-9;9)…

Lexical bias is the tendency for phonological errors to form existing words at a rate above chance. This effect has been observed in experiments and corpus analyses in Germanic languages, but S. del Viso, J. M. Igoa, and J. E. Garcia-Albea (1991) found no effect in a Spanish corpus study. Because lexical bias plays an important role in the debate…

Just as learning a first language is sometimes compared to existence within the relatively sheltered world of the Garden of Eden, the process of learning a second language is viewed as analogous to survival after expulsion from the Garden into a relatively harsh world, in which the learner must come to a conscious understanding of form and meaning…

This paper adopts the activation spreading theory to explore how lexical items are accessed. Approximately 3300 errors from both public sources and ordinary conversation in Japanese are analyzed. Analyses suggest that there are two types of environment in which contextual lexical errors occur, and that these two types of environment correspond to…

The position here is that error analysis is inadequate, particularly from the language-teaching point of view. Non-errors must be considered in specifying the learner's current command of the language, its limits, and his learning tasks. A cyclic procedure of elicitation and analysis, to secure evidence of errors and non-errors, is outlined.…

A pervasive finding from research on teaching and classroom learning is that a low rate of error on classroom tasks is associated with large year to year gains in achievement, particularly for reading in the primary grades. The finding of a negative relationship between error rate, especially rate of oral reading errors, and gains in reading…