When 16 parents' and 13 nonparents' conversations with children were examined for evidence of adults' differential responses to children's syntactic, phonological, and semantic errors, results indicated that adults tended to respond differentially to children's language mistakes, with parents showing greater sensitivity than non-parents. (RH)

Suggests that distinguishing between a second-order reflective mentality and a first-order factive mentality is central to the perception of voice. Shows that the particular language interests of compositionists can lead to new understandings about grammar and the relationship between language form and language use. (MG)

The results of a study that examined the semantic and the morph-syntactic awareness of 60 elementary school children are presented. Subjects were given the tasks of substituting a new word for each word indicated in a sentence, and choosing to eliminate any word in a sentence in order to insert a new one. (CFM)

Analyzes the ways in which second language learners of Spanish and native speakers of Spanish deal with relative and complement clauses in writing. The few differences between beginners' and advanced students' skills raised questions regarding the degree to which foreign language writing instruction focuses on the development of syntactic…

This article presents evidence supporting the syntactic nature of adjunct extraction in English and other languages, including the coextensiveness of adjunct and argument extraction and their parallelism with respect to strong/weak crossover effects. Also discussed is the challenge that binding domain effects pose for accounts of adjunct…

Examines South African Indian English (SAIE), a subvariety of South African English influenced by Indian English, other languages of India, and life in southern Africa, with particular focus on the history, phonetics, syntax, and vocabulary of SAIE. (Contains two references.) (MDM)

Discusses the use of natural language captions versus content analysis for retrieving multimedia data such as pictures. Topics addressed include using caption syntax; additional inferences from captions; supercaptions; integrating content analysis; and results of experiments on an expert system with pictures. (Contains 11 references.) (LRW)

Study of 3 and 7 year olds and adults examined role that changes in continuity, direction, instrument, and causative agent play in children's and adults' initial assumptions about meaning of novel motion verbs and events. Subjects made similar initial assumptions, but children generalized more conservatively than adults to all change types in…

The study reported here investigated the effects of using props to illustrate the meaning of sentences in a syntactic awareness task in which subjects were required to correct ungrammatical sentences. Children scored significantly higher in the props condition though the proportion of meaning-changing errors to total errors was not significantly…

This article proposes an explanation for the use of resumptives in child language based on the feature of the nominal system. A cross-linguistic comparison shows no significant difference in resumptive use between child French, child English, and child Spanish. (50 references) (JL)

Details six major research findings regarding second-language acquisition, including transitional stages for acquiring syntax; fixed-order emergence of grammatical morphemes; language acquisition progress from unmarked to marked elements; first-language influence; rule-governed learner output; and learner access to input. (27 references) (CB)

Describes a process of morpho-syntactic language analysis for information retrieval. Tree Structured Analytics (TSA) used for text representation is summarized; the matching process developed for such structures is outlined with an example appended; and experiments carried out to evaluate the effectiveness of TSA matching are discussed. (26…

This case study describes an adolescent with multiple articulation errors. Comparison with previous studies found this individual demonstrated longer phrase durations and more variability than either normally articulating or speech-disordered and language-disordered children. Interaction between syntactic and articulatory performance was also…

One possible criticism of formal syntactic theory is that it is based on a philosophy and a set of metaphors that appear superseded even in the physical sciences where they were developed. Borrowing again from the physical sciences, this paper argues for linguistic theory with a philosophical basis in interrelatedness. (39 references) (Author/VWL)

Tests and confirms hypothesis that a four-stage process exists in the understanding and use of synonyms, antonyms, and tautologies in children ages three to six. The results of this study challenge widely held theories on cognitive development. (45 references) (LET)