Presents a collection of examples of familiar erroneous grammatical constructions in a scientific context, and provides suggestions for improved sentence structure. (WRM)

Four experiments compared 4-year-olds' understanding of pretense to that of 3-year-olds or adults. When shown pictured items, 4-year-olds understood that only animates pretend, but 3-year-olds sometimes claimed that inanimates pretend. When shown actual items, even 4-year-olds sometimes claimed that inanimates pretend, especially when adults…

Four experiments examined links and differences between children's copying line diagrams and drawing solid objects. Findings suggest that emphasis on order of line copying improves copying performance because line-to-line matching is an important element of the skill, whereas this does not aid drawing of the solid object, in which focus is…

The corpus of errors produced by nonnative adult speakers of English support Miller and Gildea's (1987) KIDRULE strategy. Some dictionary users latched onto a part of the definition without understanding how it relates to the word they looked up. Other errors were the result of misleading dictionary entries. (Contains 11 references.) (Author)

Highlights current thinking on transfer or crosslinguistic influence in second language acquisition and discuses implications for second language teaching. (Author/VWL)

Children who experienced autism, mental retardation, and language disorders; and, children in a clinical control group were shown photographs of human female, orangutan, and canine (boxer) faces expressing happiness, sadness, anger, surprise and a neutral expression. For each species of faces, children were asked to identify the happy, sad, angry,…

We examined the oral and written spelling performance on the Treiman-Bourassa Early Spelling Test (Treiman & Bourassa, 2000a) of 30 children with serious reading and spelling problems and 30 spelling-level-matched younger children who were progressing normally in learning to read and spell. The 2 groups' spellings were equivalent on a composite…

According to a recent account of infants' acquisition of their physical knowledge, the incremental-knowledge account, infants form distinct event categories, such as occlusion, containment, support, and collision events. In each category, infants identify one or more vectors which correspond to distinct problems that must be solved. For each…

Five experiments are reported in which standard naming and tempo-naming tasks were used to investigate mechanisms of control over the time course of lexical processing. The time course of processing was manipulated by asking participants to time their responses with an audiovisual metronome. As the tempo of the metronome increased, results showed…

According to a recent theory, anterior cingulate cortex is sensitive to response conflict, the coactivation of mutually incompatible responses. The present research develops this theory to provide a new account of the error-related negativity (ERN), a scalp potential observed following errors. Connectionist simulations of response conflict in an…

This study investigated the development of the many-to-one counting strategy in 4- year-old children. In the first experiment, 52 children participated. Their development with respect to two kinds of tasks, a hidden-items task and a needed-items task, was studied over four sessions. Children (n = 28) who accurately used the many-to-one strategy in…

Grammatical measures that distinguish language differences from language disorders in bilingual children are scarce. This study examined English past tense morphology in sequential bilingual Spanish/English-speaking children, age 7;0-9;0 (years;months). Twelve bilingual children with language impairment (LI) or history of LI and 15 typically…

Recent accounts of the pathomechanism underlying apraxia of speech (AOS) were based on the speech production model of Levelt, Roelofs, and Meyer, and Meyer (1999)1999. The apraxic impairment was localized to the phonetic encoding level where the model postulates a mental store of motor programs for high-frequency syllables. Varley and Whiteside…

When treatments are administered in groups, clients interact in ways that lead to violations of a key assumption of most statistical analyses-the assumption of independence of observations. The resulting dependencies, when not properly accounted for, can increase Type I errors dramatically. Of the 33 studies of group-administered treatment on the…

When drawing real scenes or copying simple geometric figures young children are highly sensitive to parallel cues and use them effectively. However, this sensitivity can break down in surprisingly simple tasks such as copying a single line where robust directional errors occur despite the presence of parallel cues. Before we can conclude that this…