bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Phrase structure principles of English complex sentence formation
Authors: Rosenbaum Peter S.
Published: December 2008

The purpose of this study is to show that the theory of English syntax contains at least two phrase structure rules (cf. Chomsky, 1956, 1961) which introduce sentences. The first of these exemplifies the principle of NOUN PHRASE COMPLEMENTATION by which a sentence is introduced under the immediate domination of a noun phrase (NP). The second is VERB PHRASE COMPLEMENTATION, involving the introduction of a sentence under the immediate domination of a verb phrase (VP). These rules, couched in a workable phrase structure context, will be postulated at the outset. (For a more complete phrase structure component incorporating the principles of noun phrase and verb phrase complementation, cf. Rosenbaum & Lochak, 1966.) It will then be shown (i) that these rules follow as a consequence of syntactic theory previously formulated and independently justified and (ii) that the incorporation of these rules into the grammar of English leads to a compelling account of a wide range of English complex sentence phenomena.
Analogy and phonology
Authors: Hogg Richard M.
Published: December 2008

One of the more welcome developments in generative phonology has been the acceptance of the long-established and well-known concept that the morphophonemic structure of a language may be reorganized in an attempt to establish ‘paradigmatic coherence’, that is to say, a major rôle of analogy is to eliminate or minimize allomorphic variation within a paradigm. Of course it would be wrong to suppose that analogical change is restricted to the elimination of allomorphy; indeed, it is even possible to find examples of analogical change which increase allomorphy, as in the development of the plural imperative form onto:n of Greek einai ‘to be’ in place of the more regular esto:n.1 But, since analogical elimination of allomorphy plays such a crucial rôle in linguistic change, we may safely concentrate on that aspect of analogy in this paper without denying the many other types of change in which analogy plays a part.
Productive and non-productive morphology: the case of the German strong verbs
Authors: Barbour J. S.
Published: December 2008

In this paper various conclusions will be drawn from a comparison of productive and non-productive German verb morphology; more specifically, it examines some of the properties of the morphological component of a generative grammar of German.1

Two assumptions are made at the outset, which clearly distinguish the position adopted from that of the standard model of transformational phonology as exemplifed particularly in Chomsky & Halle (1968) (SPE). The first of these refers to the position of morphological rules in a grammar: it is that, for at least a large number of languages, the phenomena of morphology are not appropriately dealt with by syntactic, readjustment and phonological rules, in the manner of SPE, but that distinct morphological rules are required, rules which are, in particular, quite distinct from phonological rules.
Cardinal numbers in French: a study in analogical change
Authors: Picard Marc
Published: December 2008

I. I. In a paper dealing with the analogical elimination of allomorphy and the explanatory (in)adequacy of generative phonology in accounting for it, Hogg hypothesized that ‘a necessary condition for analogical change is that the alternation which is subject to the analogy must not be synchronically rule-governed’ (1979: 58). This observation was elevated to the status of a principle which was formulated as follows:

Analogical extension or levelling of some phonological rule can take place only if that rule is no longer present in the synchronic grammar of the language (Hogg, 1979: 8).
Verb-preposition constructions and small clauses in English
Authors: Aarts Bas
Published: December 2008

The analysis of verb-particle constructions, or verb-preposition constructions, as I will call them, has-given rise to much debate in the linguistic literature over a long period of time. Traditionally, a bipartite classification of these structures has been assumed consisting of a class of ‘phrasal verbs’, such as those in (1) and (2), and a class of ‘prepositional verbs’, such as those in (3):

(1) Iswitchedthe lightoff.

(2) Ilookedthe informationup.

(3)Look atthe prospectus: it clearly states that your admissiondepends onyour examination results.
How to do things with junk: exaptation in language evolution
Authors: Lass Roger
Published: December 2008

One of the less rewarding of our common interdisciplinary pursuits is lifting theoretical concepts from subjects not our own, and using them in contexts very distant from those they were intended for. Such borrowings often turn from theoretical claims into sloppy metaphors, leading to varieties of ‘vulgar X-ism’, the resuit of overenthusiastic appropriation with insufficient sense of the subtlety or precise applicability of the originals. Spencer's ‘Social Darwinism’, vulgar-Freudian or vulgar-Marxist literary analysis and sociology are nice examples. Linguistics, being less unique than linguists often think, is no exception: Praguian and neo-Praguian functionalism may be a kind of vulgar Darwinism, extending notions of ‘adaptation’ or ‘selective pressure’ to the inappropriate domain of language Systems (see Lass, 1980a). But every once in a while such transfers seem to work, like Darwin's borrowings from late eighteenth-century Scottish economie theory; if not always through direct applicability, then by focusing on new ways of interpreting old data, or providing a basis for linking disparate phenomena as instances of a new (putative) natural kind.
Diachrony and synchrony in word stress
Authors: Roca Iggy
Published: December 2008

In Roca (1988) I take to task Harris (1983) and Den Os & Kager (1986) and propose a novel approach to Spanish (nonverbal) word stress according to which (i) the algorithm is not quantity sensitive and thus differs from that of Latin, the parent language, (ii) the system does not obey the Uniformity of Algorithm Principle, (iii) the algorithm operates on the morphological stem, rather than on the whole word. As regards (i), I made the suggestion (418,ibid.) that the preferred paroxytone stress in native forms with penultimate closed syllables must be formalized as a lexical prohibition on extra-metricality markings in the given environments. Clearly, the formalization of this proposal and the exploration of its consequences are central to the analysis. Moreover, while the arguments for a relaxation of the Uniformity of Algorithm Principle still stand, departures from the principle are doubtless costly and therefore best avoided. Finally, in Roca (1988) there is no discussion of the consequences of (iii) above for the cyclic data presented in Harris (1983), the compatibility of which with (iii) is consequently unclear. All these facts warrant a re-examination of the issue, which I propose to carry out in the present paper.
Assimilation, deletion paths and underspecification
Authors: Lodge Ken
Published: December 2008

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate that underspecification of lexical-entry forms enables us to restrict phonological theory to declarative statements about the structure of lexical items, and to avoid having recourse to feature-changing and deletion rules. The realizations of lexical items are mapped onto their underlying forms by means of filling-in, redundancy rules of two basic types, predictive and default. Predictive rules derive (at least) one feature from (at least) one other feature, given in the lexical entry form, and default rules provide a feature, if no other rule has applied. Rules are both universal and language-specific. Since all filling-in is accounted for by these redundancy rules, there is no need for a post-lexical component of the phonology.
Irregularity as a determinant of morphological change
Authors: Maiden Martin
Published: December 2008

In morphology, as in other branches of scientific endeavour, apparent disorder and irregularity tend to be re-analysed as underlying order. Asymmetries between form and meaning, such as allomorphy, tend accordingly to be factored into basic invariance,2 sames of meaning being interpreted, where possible, as sames of form. Alternatively, as in some of Bybee's (1985) analyses of fusional allomorphy, differences in form may be viewed as diagrammatic of differences in meaning. Allomorphic variants which cannot be made to yield to such re-analyses are commonly relegated to a kind of marginal synchronie ‘junkpile’, and are assumed to be a synchronically ‘inert’ residue of historical (usually phonological) changes. That such an approach to allomorphy can often be illuminating is not in question, but it bespeaks an essentially negative view of morphological irregularity. I wish to propose that there is room for a complementary perspective, in which the ‘irregularity’ inherent in allomorphy can be appreciated not as basically ‘inert’ deviation from a natural isomorphic relationship between meaning and form, but as an active, abstract structural property of morphological systems.
Negative and factive islands revisited
Authors: Rooryck Johan
Published: December 2008

Several restrictions on successive cyclicwh-movement appear not to be exclusively linked to general principles of the grammar, but seem to be in some sense lexically determined. It has been pointed out repeatedly thatwh-movement of subjects and adjuncts out of complement CPs of factive verbs strongly contrasts withwh-movement of internal arguments out of these CPs (Rouveret, 1980; Kayne, 1981; Zubizarreta, 1982; Adams, 1985): (1) (a) *Who do you regret/understand/forget likes this book? (= Adams, 1985: (4b)) (b) *How did he deeply regret that his son had fixed the car? (c) ?Which article did you regret/understand/forget that I had selected?
Adjunct extraction
Authors: Hukari Thomas E. , Levine Robert D.
Published: December 2008

In current linguistic theory, the theoretical status of adjunct extractions, as in for exampleHow often do you think Robin sees Kim?is, somewhat surprisingly, an unresolved issue, with some investigators arguing that only arguments extract syntactically, entailing analyses of adverbial gaps via fundamentally different mechanisms from those posited for argument extraction. We adduce extensive evidence against such positions from a number of languages which exhibit morphological or syntactic phenomena which are sensitive to binding (extraction) domains and where this morphosyntactic flagging is present in instances of adjunct extraction as well as argument extraction. We also present language-internal arguments for the syntactic nature of adjunct extraction in English, including the coextensiveness of adjunct and argument extraction and their parallelism with respect to strong/weak crossover effects. Finally, we discuss the challenge which binding domain effects pose for accounts of adjunct extraction in various frameworks.
The scope of discourse connectives: implications for discourse organization
Authors: Unger Christoph
Published: December 2008

The main aim of this paper is to discuss the claim that discourse connectives are best treated as indicators of coherence relations between hierarchically organized discourse units. It will be argued that coherence relations cannot be seen as cognitively real entities. Furthermore, there is no evidence for hierarchical organization in discourse. The intuitions underlying the notion of hierarchical discourse structure are instead explained in terms of consequences of processing a text in the search for optimal relevance. This account draws attention to a hitherto not widely discussed set of data.
Aspects of varieties differentiation
Authors: Gregory Michael
Published: December 2008

There has been much discussion of intra-lingual varieties in recent years. Catford has pertinently stated the problem which has prompted this discussion and justified the need to solve it (1965:83): ‘The concept of a “whole language” is so vast and heterogeneous that it is not operationally useful for many linguistic purposes, descriptive, comparative and pedagogical. It is therefore desirable to have a framework of categories for the classification of “sub-languages” or varieties within a total language.’
Transformacia kak metod lingvističeskogo analiza
Authors: Pocheptsov G. G.
Published: December 2008

‘Transformation as a technique for linguistic analysis’, by G. G. Pocheptsov, The Kiev Pedagogical Institute for Foreign Languages, Kiev, U.S.S.R. Abstract (by the Editor). Despite the intensive development of transformational theory in the last ten years, certain fundamental questions have not yet been answered. In particular, the notion of ‘structural meaning’ has not been clarified, and criteria are lacking for deciding whether a given transformational difference is ‘structural’. The author distinguishes two kinds of structural meanings associated with grammatical units: ‘explicit’ and ‘implicit’. The former belong to the surface-structure of language, and were the primary concern of the traditional theory of the parts of speech and parts of the sentence; the latter belong to deep-structure, and traditional grammar did not have the apparatus required for their investigation – transformations. The most interesting transformations are those which ‘translate’ implicit meanings into explicit: e.g., the NP, Ms book, in This book is easy to read has the implicit meaning ‘object’, by contrast with this boy in This boy is eager to read. Both sentences may be transformationally ‘reduced’ to the same surface-structure, N V Da. (This book reads easily, This boy reads eagerly): but the structural conditions for the application of the transformations are not identical. The author discusses each sentence in relation to other characteristic transformational possibilities. Finally, the following fundamental types of transformation are distinguished, and illustrated from English: (a) those which establish both a difference of IC structure and a difference between the syntactic relations of the constituents; (b) those which formalize differences in the implicit structural meanings of constituents; (c) those which establish differences between sentence-constituents at the level of word classes and subclasses. Transformational analysis is of relatively small importance in the investigation of ‘lexico-derivational’ and ‘lexico-phraseological’ constraints. It is a valuable method of analysis, but must not be extended beyond its domain of relevance.
The development of young children's speech act comprehension: How much language is necessary?
Authors: Reeder Kenneth , Wakefield Jane
Published: December 2008

Two experimental studies investigate the extent of 3- and 4-year-olds' relative dependence upon contextual and linguistic information as they discriminate between presentations of Requests from Offers, and Requests from Questions presented in contexts. Contexts are manipulated systematically, and quantity of linguistic information in the presentations is progressively reduced. While younger subjects' discrimination of each speech act appeared relatively unaffected by reduction of linguistic information, the older subjects' performance was relatively adversely affected. We consider a developmental shift in speech act comprehension strategy from an early more context-based approach to a later, more heavily text-dependent approach, perhaps linked to continuing development of linguistic awareness.
A note concerning /s/ plus stop clusters in the speech of language-delayed children
Authors: Bond Z. S.
Published: December 2008

The acquisition of /s/ plus stop clusters by language-delayed children was compared with normal acquisition, first, for phonemic substitutions and second, for differential use of voice onset time (VOT) for the substituted stops. Ten children, diagnosed as language delayed, produced 95 percent of the intended clusters as singleton stops; children who could employ VOT contrastively produced most stops, substituting for clusters with VOT values in the long lag range.
Acquisition and generalization of Japanese locatives by English-speakers
Authors: Weber-Olsen Marcia , Ruder Kenneth F.
Published: December 2008

American 5-year-olds and adults learned to label various spatial relationships using four Japanese locatives that coincided or partially overlapped in meaning with the locative prepositions into, onto, out of, and off.

Subjects' generalization of the Japanese words was pre- and post-tested to determine if locatives that were semantically (and to a small extent phonemically) similar to their English equivalents would yield better transfer than terms that deviated in meaning and phonemic structure from English. Results confirmed for children only that generalization was differentially affected following lexical training. Adults generalized all four Japanese words with equal accuracy and showed significantly better transfer than children on all but one locative.

Lexical interference initially accounted for many adult and child substitution errors, but did not explain child errors on the post-test. Findings did not agree with predictions that semanticphonemic differences between English and Japanese locatives would adversely affect transfer of the Japanese lexicon to novel exemplars of these terms. Results did confirm, however, that adults learned the Japanese lexicon faster and better than the 5-year-olds.
Generalization of correct articulation in clusters
Authors: McReynolds Leija V. , Elbert Mary F.
Published: December 2008

Cluster Reduction is purported to be a general phonological process applied by misarticulating children to simplify production of the two consonants in a cluster. In this study the generality of the process was explored in six misarticulating children. The children produced errors on all /s/ and /r/ or /l/ clusters in baseline. In a counterbalanced order three children were trained on /s/ clusters first and /r/ or /l/ clusters second in a multiple baseline design; whereas three children received training on /r/ clusters first and /s/ clusters second. Generalization to other forms of /s/ and /r/ or /l/ clusters was tested throughout training. Results showed that with one exception children generalized to within class clusters but not to across class clusters. It was concluded that if cluster error patterns reflect processes, the processes are not general enough to operate across classes, but rather, are confined to the cluster receiving training.
Dialectic use of causative verbs: You can't ‘take’ it with you
Authors: Abkarian G. G.
Published: December 2008

Forty-eight adult subjects from the northeastern United States were evaluated for their productive use of the causative verbs bring and take. Results revealed that approximately one-fourth of the subjects employed the terms contrastively and consistent with standard use whereas one-third employed a bring over-extension strategy seeming to impute a ‘carry’ meaning to the term. The remaining subjects, although evidencing some take use. did not routinely employ standard, deictically based source or goal distinctions. The validity of the findings was tested in two additional experiments. The nature of these alternative productive strategies and their implications are discussed.
Spelling strategies in good and poor readers
Authors: Perin Dolores
Published: December 2008

This study investigates the use of phoneme-grapheme correspondence rules assumed to underlie phonetic spelling errors. Fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds and adult literacy students did two spelling tasks employing real words and nonwords respectively. Good and poor readers were compared in their ability to produce graphemic representations for four specific phonemes. Two of these were relatively “ambiguous” and the real-word task investigated the effect of ambiguity as a function of reading skill. While good readers were significantly better than poor readers at representing the critical phonemes, ambiguity had a similar effect on good and poor readers. Nonword results indicate that poor readers can employ phoneme-grapheme correspondences more than is expected from their real-word spelling error patterns.
Environmental correlates of variation in lexical style: Interactional style and the structure of the input
Authors: Pine Julian M.
Published: December 2008

Since the publication of Nelson's (1973) monograph, several studies have reported significant correlations between variation in children's early vocabulary composition and differences in the functional characteristics of mothers' child-directed speech. However, it is still not clear how these relations are actually mediated. The present study attempts to investigate thís issue by differentiating and testing two alternative explanations of the relations found in previous research on data from a study of eight mother–infant dyads between 0;11 and 1;8. Despite replicating previous findings of a relation between maternal descriptiveness and the proportion of nouns and maternal directiveness and the proportion of verbs in children's early vocabularies, the results reveal no relation between differences in mothers' interactional behavior and differences in the functional characteristics of their children's spontaneous speech. On the other hand, specific relations were found between children's referential vocabularies and maternal descriptives that included nouns and between children's verb vocabularies and maternal directives that included verbs. These findings not only raise doubts about the validity of a functional similarity account of relations between maternal speech characteristics and variation in early vocabulary composition, but also suggest that they may be better understood in terms of the interaction between processing mechanisms that are common to all children and differences in the structure of the input to which different children are actually exposed.
Conversational skills and modeling in learning disabled boys
Authors: Donahue Mavis , Bryan Tanis
Published: December 2008

Learning disabled (LD) children in the role of interviewer have been found to be less skilled than nondisabled children at initiating and sustaining a dialogue with a classmate. This study tested the effects of modeling on these conversational skills and on metaconversational knowledge. LD and nondisabled boys in grades 2 through 8 listened to either a dialogue of a child interviewer modeling open-ended questions, conversational devices and contingent comments and responses, or a monologue presenting only the interviewee's responses. Each subject was then videotaped interviewing a classmate. Although the dialogue model increased LD children's production of open-ended questions and comments, these strategies appeared more difficult for their listeners to understand and expand. Results of the metaconversational responses suggest that LD children are aware of their difficulties in conversational interaction.
Spelling disability: A developmental linguistic analysis of pattern abstraction
Authors: Schwartz Sybil
Published: December 2008

The ability of Learning Disabled Spellers to abstract spelling patterns was compared to two groups of normal spellers; Poor and Good. One hundred and eighty children were studied: 20 Good Spellers, 20 Poor Spellers, and 20 Learning Disabled Spellers at each age level from 8 to 10 years. Patterns were investigated using three tests; two multiple choice tests, one with nonsense words and one with real words, and a dictation test using nonsense words. The Learning Disabled Spellers showed little ability to abstract patterns at ages 8 and 9 but made considerable improvement from 9 to 10. The performance of the Learning Disabled Spellers was significantly below that of both the Good and Poor Spellers and quite distinct from the Poor Spellers. Error analyses suggest that the responses of the Learning Disabled Spellers are characteristic of those of younger, normal children.
Learning disabled children's conversational competence: An attempt to activate the inactive listener
Authors: Donahue Mavis L.
Published: December 2008

Learning disabled children have been found to be less likely than nondisabled children to request clarification of ambiguous messages provided by adults. This study tested a strategy deficit hypothesis as one source of this conversational deficit by assessing the effects of a brief intervention which highlighted the appropriate response strategy, i.e., question-asking. Learning disabled and non-disabled children in grades four, five, and six played the listener role in a referential communication task requiring them to select referents based on messages varying in informational adequacy. Although group and grade differences replicated previous findings, the intervention condition had no effect on the children's performance on a posttest. An analysis of referent selections indicated that the inactive listeners were overrelying on the Maxim of Quantity, the Gricean principle that cooperative speakers provide informative messages. These results suggest that conversational development depends on children's increasing ability to recognize contexts in which these conversational principles do not apply.
On accounting for deficiencies in order memory associated with reading difficulty: A reply to Tallal
Authors: Katz Robert B. , Healy Alice F. , Shankweiler Donald
Published: December 2008

In response to Tallal's critical comments on our paper (Katz, Healy & Shank-weiler, 1983), we will review the findings that suggest that deficiencies in using a phonetic memory strategy underlie the inferior order memory of children with reading disability. We will then examine the alternative explanations of the order memory deficits suggested by Tallal, which, it will be seen, do not prove satisfactory.
Accuracy of perception and production of compound and phrasal stress by Vietnamese-Australians
Authors: Pittam Jeffery , Ingram John
Published: December 2008

This study considered the accuracy of perception and production of the compound-phrasal contrast by Vietnamese-Australians learning English and examined phonological, demographic, and speaker normalization factors that might influence acquisition of the contrast. In the study, 32 Vietnamese subjects took part; their performance on the perception part of the study was compared to that of 32 native English-speaking Australians. Complexity of phonological environment, in terms of number of syllables and consonant clusters alien to Vietnamese phonology, and length of residence in Australia were found to be the major factors influencing both the perception and production of the contrast. Accuracy of perception and production were highly correlated. Australian subjects, while performing significantly better than Vietnamese subjects on the perception task, nevertheless demonstrated the same pattern of accuracy across different levels of phonological complexity as had the latter.
Hearing-impaired students learning new words from written context
Authors: De Villiers Peter A. , Pomerantz Sarah B.
Published: December 2008

Normally hearing students acquire most of their reading vocabulary from printed context, but little is known about this process in hearing-impaired students. Two studies, therefore, investigated hearing-impaired students' ability to derive lexical and syntactic information about unknown words embedded in short passages of text. The passages varied in their informativeness about the meaning of the unknown words. Ability to derive at least a partial meaning for a word in context was determined both by the type of context and the reading comprehension levels of the students. However, there was no relationship between reading comprehension scores and ability to determine the form class of the words in context. The results are related to the importance of integrating semantic information into a meaning schema for the passage in order to acquire new meanings for unknown words and to the local strategies adopted by poorer readers when attempting to answer comprehension questions. Implications for explaining, and trying to ameliorate, the well-documented vocabulary limitations of hearing-impaired students are discussed.
Initial voicing contrast acquisition in normal and phonologically disordered children
Authors: Tyler Ann A. , Saxman John H.
Published: December 2008

Speech sound production changes that occurred during acquisition of the initial voicing contrast induced through treatment in phonologically disordered children were compared to those that occurred during normal acquisition of the contrast. Target stop productions from three normally developing children and six phonologically disordered children were analyzed acoustically along the temporal measure of VOT. The phonologically disordered subjects displayed different patterns of voicing contrast acquisition, none of which replicated the normally developing children's pattern. The phonologically disordered children's patterns of acquisition were characterized by larger and more variable VOT values in comparison to those of the normally developing children. Different patterns of voicing contrast acquisition observed in VOTs are discussed with regard to the nature of linguistic change and the source of breakdown in children's speech sound errors.
Predictors of transfer out of early French immersion programs
Authors: Bruck Margaret
Published: December 2008

This study examined the factors that best predict which elementary schoolchildren will ultimately transfer out of a French immersion program. At the end of one school year, French immersion teachers nominated poor-achieving students who might transfer to an English stream and who may elect not to leave the program. All of the children were immediately tested and parents and teachers were interviewed. The status of the project children was monitored over the next year to determine which children transferred to an English stream. Analysis of the pretransfer data indicated that although cognitive-academic variables may be necessary conditions for transfer, they are not sufficient conditions. Specifically, while the children who transferred experienced academic problems, these were no more severe than those of children who did not transfer. Rather, the transfer children were unique in terms of their poorer attitudes, motivations, and nonacademic behaviors. This pattern of results was found for the teacher, parent, and child data. The analyses suggest that attitudinal and motivational factors are of primary importance to the continuation of second-language study by young learners.
A dialogic analysis of interaction between mothers and their deaf or hearing preschoolers
Authors: Nienhuys Terry G. , Horsborough Kim M. , Cross Toni G.
Published: December 2008

Dialogic interaction between mothers and their age-matched or linguistically matched hearing and hearing-impaired children was investigated. The study employed the cognitively based System of dialogic analysis proposed by Blank and Franklin (1980). The System assesses each participant both as initiator and responder, and judges each participant's initiations for cognitive complexity and summoning power, as well as the appropriateness of participants' responses. Four samples of eight mother–child dyads were investigated, including hearing and hearing-impaired 2-year-olds and 5-year-olds. Results revealed differences between hearing and hearing-impaired dyads along most dimensions, including the number and form of initiations employed, the complexity levels of initiations, and appropriateness of the child's responses, as well as measures of the degree of dialogic exchange that took place in the mother–child dyads.
Language performance and reading ability at 8 years of age
Authors: Morice Rodney , Slaghuis Walter
Published: December 2008

Language performance measures obtained from poor readers at 8 years of age were significantly poorer than those for matched good readers. Impairment affected both language comprehension, as measured by the Token Test, and language production, as measured by a detailed syntactic analysis of spoken language samples. Children with combined performance impairment (both comprehension and production) were the poorest readers, and children with no measured language impairment were the best. Subjects with single-modality impairment (comprehension or production) were average readers at age 8. By age 9, the combined performance impairment group had deteriorated in reading level (against age), as had the comprehension impairment group. The results support proposals for age-dependent differences between reading groups, and further suggest that syntactic impairment may exert a greater constraint on reading ability with increasing age.
Developmental surface dysgraphia: A case report
Authors: Temple Christine M.
Published: December 2008

The spelling performance of a 17-year-old developmental dysgraphic. K. M., is compared to that of T. P. (Hatfield & Patterson, 1983), an acquired dysgraphic. Both make errors which are phonologically valid and spell regular words better than irregular words. Within the words, relative difficulty in spelling is also similar and may result from the effects of length, frequency and. for exception words, the presence or absence of a similarly spelt word. The spelling performance of K. M. may be interpreted as reflecting a phonological routine. The correspondences involved in this system do not differ from those used by normal children of the same spelling age. Subtle deficits in reading may have contributed to spelling difficulties.
The communicative functions of lexical usage by language impaired children
Authors: Leonard Laurence B. , Camarata Stephen , Rowan Lynne E. , Chapman Kathy
Published: December 2008

This study examines the communicative functions served by the lexical usage of normal and language impaired children whose speech was limited to single-word utterances. The two groups were similar in the frequency with which they produced utterances serving most of the functions. However, naming was more frequent in the normal children's speech, while answering was more frequent in the speech of the language impaired children. The two groups were indistinguishable in terms of the number of different lexical items they used in the service of each of the communicative functions.
The acquisition of morphology by a bilingual child: A whole-word approach
Authors: Vihman Marilyn May
Published: December 2008

The avoidance of inflectional markers, a kind of “macrodevelopment” in the acquisition of morphology, is described in this analysis of the strategies displayed by a bilingual child simultaneously exposed to Estonian and to English. A whole-word approach was manifested in: the acquisition of postpositions before case endings; the learning of pronominal case and other suppletive or irregular forms before regular markers were used; the borrowing of the analytic English construction with have into Estonian; and the preference for did + verb for the expression of the English past tense. In interpreting these data the factor of bilingualism per se is weighed against the possible existence of a whole-word approach to language in general as a manifestation of a particular cognitive style.
Referential place-holding in Chinese children's acquisition of English articles
Authors: Lee Kang , Cameron Catherine Ann , Linton Murrary J. , Hunt Anne K.
Published: December 2008

This longitudinal study examines the acquisition of English articles by three 6-year-old, second language learning children whose native tongue is Chinese, a language without articles. Brown's coding scheme and an extended coding scheme were used in scoring the corpora of children's responses to a Syntax Elicitation Task. Results revealed that the Chinese children's acquisition of the definite article differed from- what had been previously found using Brown's coding scheme with English as first language learners and second language learning children of other native language origins. Chinese children's use of the definite article developed through an unmarked phase, a referential place-holding phase, a marked phase, and a referential substitution phase before the definite article was fully acquired. The acquisition of the indefinite article, on the other hand, was similar to the acquisition pattern already reported for children learning English as a first language or as a second language. It is suggested that referential place-holding, as well as referential substitution, might not be a Chinese-specific second language learning phenomenon; rather, they might be derived from a universal referential strategy for learning articles.
The role of letter names in children's learning of phoneme–grapheme relations
Authors: Treiman Rebecca , Weatherston Sarah , Berch Denise
Published: December 2008

Three studies were performed to explore the role of letter names in children's learning of correspondences between phonemes and graphemes. Some preschoolers and kindergartners were found to spell initial /w/ asy. They made this error because the name of y, /wai/, begins with /w/. Kindergartners in another study often said thatymakes the sound /wdoubt/, even after they had been taught otherwise. Other results suggested that children benefit from letter-name knowledge to spell phonemes such as /b/, which occur at the beginning of a consonant-vowel letter name. Letter-name knowledge is less helpful for phonemes such as /1/, which occur at the end of a vowel-consonant letter name. Our findings suggest that children use their knowledge of letter names and their phonological segmentation skills when they learn the correspondences between phonemes and graphemes. They do not memorize these links in a rote, paired-associate manner.
Novices and experts: An information processing approach to the “good language learner” problem
Authors: Nation Robert , Mclaughlin Barry
Published: December 2008

It is hypothesized that strategies and techniques employed by “expert” language learners differ from those of “novice” learners. In this study, the performance of multilingual subjects was contrasted to that of bilingual and monolingual subjects on two tasks that involved learning a miniature linguistic system. Under “implicit” learning conditions, multilingual subjects showed superior performance to that of the other two groups, but under “explicit” conditions, there were no differences. The results were interpreted in information processing terms as indicating that multilingual subjects have strategies that help them allocate processing resources more efficiently than our other subjects in formulating informal rules of limited scope under implicit conditions.
Sound change: A phonemic split in a misarticulating child
Authors: Gierut Judith A.
Published: December 2008

The purpose of this paper is to report a clinically induced phonemic split (i.e., the restructuring of allophones as distinct phonemes) by presenting longitudinal data from a functionally misarticulating child. For this child, three qualitatively and quantitatively distinct stages were observed relative to the acquisition of the phonemic split:
1. complementary distribution (allophones of the same phoneme);
2. position-specific free variation (intermediate to a phonemic split); and
3. phonemic distinction for some, but not all morphemes (phonemic split).

The results of this clinical case study, documenting the nature and development of a phonemic split, have implications for related phenomena in normal language acquisition, second-language learning, and sound change in primary languages.
The crosslinguistic assessment of foreign language vocabulary learning
Authors: Kempe Vera , Macwhinney Brian
Published: December 2008

This study examines a task that can be applied in a uniform fashion across different languages to compare levels of vocabulary development in foreign language learning. Experiment I tested native speakers of Russian and German and demonstrated the basic comparability of the subjects' judgments for both words and nonwords. The results for Russian showed an influence of word length, which can be understood in terms of the Orthographical Depth Hypothesis. Experiment 2 applied the same task to learners of Russian and German and found that learners of Russian had achieved a lower level of vocabulary control than learners of German at comparable language exposure levels. This disadvantage for Russian can be attributed to the novelty of the Cyrillic graphemic system, which restricts the accessibility of written language input at early stages. There was a nonlinear increase over time in word sensitivity, which can be attributed to the increasing contribution of lexical plausibility factors at later stages of learning. Moreover, the lexical decision task appeared to be sensitive to inhibitory effects of concurrently studied languages, as well as to decay due to the lack of regular exposure. Together, these results indicate that the lexical decision task can be a useful tool for the assessment and crosslinguistic comparison of lexical development in foreign language learning.
The role of linguistic perception in later phonological development
Authors: Velleman Shelley L.
Published: December 2008

This study tested the hypothesis that certain sound substitutions in older, normally developing children are perceptually based substitutions, typified by poor discrimination, while others are phonetic substitutions – phonemic distinctions that are maintained by the child in a phonetically non-adult fashion. The perception and production of English voiceless fricatives in twelve normally developing monolingual children aged 3;2–5;6 was investigated using a picture-pointing task, audio recordings, and acoustic analysis. Results include significant correlations between production and perception scores for /θ/ but not /s/ and significant acoustic differences in substitutions of [θ] for /s/ (versus productions of [θ] for /θ/) but not in substitutions of [f] or [s] for /θ/. It is suggested that substitutions for /θ/, with the correlated poor discrimination, may indicate a non-adult phonemic representation, while substitutions for /s/ tend to have a motoric basis in older children. Stages in the acquisition of /θ/ are hypothesized.
Contextual influences on children's spoken and written explanations
Authors: Donaldson Morag L.
Published: December 2008

The relative influences of medium and context variables were investigated by comparing 7- and 8-year-old children's spoken and written explanations in varying contexts: a story task, a question task, a sentence completion task, and a whole sentence production task. In the story task, performance in a “purpose” condition (which provided a specific communicative purpose for the production of an explanation) was compared with performance in a “neutral” condition. The frequency of explanations containing correct causal expressions was significantly higher in the purpose condition than in the neutral condition and significantly lower in the story task than in the three more structured tasks. In contrast to these contextual influences, performance in the written medium was very similar to performance in the spoken medium.
Phonemic segmentation skill and spelling acquisition
Authors: Rohl Mary , Tunmer William E.
Published: December 2008

A spelling-age match design was used to test the hypothesis that deficits in phonologically related skills may be causally related to difficulties in acquiring basic spelling knowledge. Poor grade 5 spellers, average grade 3 spellers, and good grade 2 spellers matched on a standardized spelling test, and a group of good grade 5 spellers matched by chronological age with the poor grade 5 spellers were administered a phonemic segmentation test containing nondigraph pseudowords and an experimental spelling test containing words of the following four types: exception, ambiguous, regular, and pseudowords. Consistent with the hypothesis, it was found that when compared with the poor spellers, the average and good spellers performed better on the phonemic segmentation task, made fewer errors in spelling pseudowords, and made spelling errors that were more phonetically accurate.
Children's picture naming difficulty and errors: Effects of age of acquisition, uncertainty, and name generality
Authors: Johnson Carla J. , Clark James M.
Published: December 2008

On the basis of prior research and a theoretical analysis of picture naming, we examined three correlates of child picture naming difficulty: age of name acquisition, picture-to-name uncertainty, and name generality (instance or category names). Study 1 demonstrated that late age of acquisition and high adult name uncertainty were associated with increased naming difficulty for both single instance and category items from the Expressive One-Word Picture Vocabulary Test (EOWPVT) (Gardner, 1979). Age of acquisition was a particularly strong predictor for instance items. Moreover, category pictures were more difficult to name than single instance pictures with names of comparable age of acquisition. In Study 2, analysis of incorrect responses to category pictures demonstrated that children made more instance errors than adults, but not more errors of other kinds. Study 2 also showed that a child uncertainty measure correlated more strongly with EOWPVT item difficulty than the adult measure of Study 1. The findings suggest that picture naming scores reflect both the availability of the names in lexical memory and their accessibility, which, in turn, partly depend on the amount of interference from competing responses. Some implications for the interpretation and remediation of picture naming deficits are suggested.
Referential mapping: A technique for attaching functional significance to the innovative utterances of an African Grey parrot (Psittacus erithacus)
Authors: Pepperberg Irene M.
Published: December 2008

A set of procedures called referential mapping has been used to assign meaning to spontaneous vocalizations of an African Grey parrot. These spontaneous vocalizations were combinations and phonological variations of specific vocal English labels that the bird had previously acquired in a study on interspecies communication. These recombinations were not necessarily intentionally used to describe or request novel objects or circumstances, even though our earlier data demonstrated that the bird could use vocalizations referentially and intentionally to identify, request, refuse, and categorize various objects. The procedures for dealing with this bird's spontaneous modifications neither attempted to nor needed to evaluate the intentionality of his behavior. Rather, the procedures instructed his trainers to respond to the novel speech acts as though he were intentionally commenting about or requesting objects, actions, or information. The success of such procedures in attaching functional significance to his spontaneous vocalizations and in encouraging subsequent innovation suggests that the technique might be applicable to intervention programs for humans with specific communicative deficits.
Discourse analysis of schizophrenic speech: A critique and proposal
Authors: Alverson H. , Rosenberg S.
Published: December 2008

There is wide agreement that current psycholinguistic techniques (especially discourse analysis) may help us better understand the relationship between psychopathology and linguistic performance. This application would seem particularly worthwhile in the domain of schizophrenic speech, which has resisted adequate characterization in terms of earlier linguistic paradigms. A major effort at systematic psycholinguistic analysis has been made and is most developed in Rochester and Martin's (1979) monograph, Crazy Talk. While we see their interest in utilizing discourse analysis to be very appropriate, it manifests some serious shortcomings. Accordingly, we attempt to give a clearer picture of discourse analysis and the assumptions behind it. This elucidation should provide a better indication of both the promise and the procedures of a discourse-analytic approach to the speech productions of psychiatric populations.