The task of all language learners is to match form and meaning. This study investigates the associations of form and meaning in the developing tense and aspect systems of adult learners of English as a second language. A cross-sectional study of 135 learners at six levels of proficiency was conducted using a cloze passage and compositions on the same topic. The interlanguage tense and aspect systems can be characterized as showing high formal accuracy, but relatively lower appropriate use across all levels. During the period when appropriate use lags behind formal accuracy, learners seem to associate form and meaning through alternative interim hypotheses related to lexical aspect and discourse function.

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.

Fourteen matched pairs of German-speaking and English-speaking language-impaired children, aged 4;5–6;11, were tested for their knowledge of grammatical morphology and expressive vocabulary, using the Grammatical Closure subtest of the ITPA or its German adaptation, Grammatik in the PET, and the Expressive One-Word Picture Vocabulary Test or the Aktiver Wortschatztest. Children were matched pairwise on the basis of their chronological age, nonverbal IQ, and scores in a sentence imitation and a sentence production task. As predicted, the German-speaking language-impaired children earned higher scores in grammatical morphology and vocabulary than did the English-speaking children. These findings add to a growing body of literature that documents language-specific sensitivity to particular sorts of syntactic devices. They also suggest that the morphological difficulties seen in English-speaking language-impaired children stem in part from the minor functional role played by these forms during the early language learning years.

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.

This study explores the adjustment of Greek remigrant students in Greek public schools after their families' return to Greece from the Federal Republic of Germany. Teacher and self-rating instruments were used, and achievement and language competence data were obtained. The sample consisted of 13- to 15-year-old junior high school students in northern Greece. The remigrant students were divided into two groups (“early return” and “late return”), based on the year of return to Greece. The control group consisted of all the local classmates of these students. Remigrant students (mainly late return) were found to experience difficulties mainly in the language/learning domain and less in the interpersonal and intrapersonal behavior domains.

It is commonly found that most deaf readers display an overall depressed level of reading performance in conjunction with specific difficulties in complex syntax. In this study, deaf good and poor readers' comprehension of relative clause structures was tested in written English, signed English, and American Sign Language. It was found that the behavior of deaf good and poor readers was parallel across relative clause sentence types, and that the deaf readers generally performed similarly to hearing readers tested in a different study. These results support the hypothesis that a specific syntactic disability does not differentiate deaf good and poor readers. Instead, it is suggested that a processing deficit may underlie the poor readers' comprehension difficulties.

The relationships among the familiarity of an idiom's figurative meaning, the likelihood of its literal meaning (literalness), and its usage were explored. Previous research has been inconsistent in supporting any one model of idiom comprehension, although certain factors have been found to affect reading times of sentences containing idioms. Consistent with this research, familiarity was found to have a significant effect on reading times for sentences containing idioms. A significant new finding is that literalness affects reading times. Additionally, it was found that familiarity and literalness exert interactive effects, suggesting a common underlying mechanism. The results are interpreted as supporting a model of idiom comprehension in which a single phrase processor simultaneously computes figurative and literal meanings of idioms.

This article explores typology-based differences in patterns of bilingual behavior by analyzing code-switches of Korean-English bilingual speakers, a language group that has not received much study so far. Data collected from 20 balanced bilinguals was analyzed to address the issues of linguistic constraints on code-switching and applicability of the concepts of nonce borrowing, language assignment, and neutrality to the phenomena observed. Two interesting code-switching phenomena were found: a change of the part of speech in the process of making small-size nonequivalence constituent switches and an introduction of Korean “operating verbs,” which are inflected to indicate the degree of respect to the interlocutor. Four subjects (two males, two females), who were taped in two different contexts, showed a reduction in social code-switching and a higher rate of English monolingual sentences when talking to their spouses than to an acquaintance.

At issue in the present research is whether native speakers' “simplified” or modified utterances, as in foreigner-talk (FT), actually facilitate comprehension for nonnative speakers hearing such utterances. It was hypothesized that (grammatical) Dutch inversion sentences (AdvVSO) that have proven to be problematic in studies on Dutch second language (L2) acquisition - as reflected both in the (ungrammatical) output of L2 learners and in the (ungrammatical) FT input to L2 learners - would not be problematic in terms of comprehension, when compared with modified, ungrammatical AdvSVO and AdvSOV sentences, as long as such sentences do not express an implausible state of affairs. Three subject groups participated in the experiment: 20 English and 22 Turkish L2 learners of Dutch and 30 Dutch native speakers (control group). Subjects heard and interpreted declarative Dutch sentences, in which word order (NVN, VNN, NNV) and animacy configurations (Al [i.e., animate/inanimate], AA, LA) were systematically manipulated. Subjects had to name the noun (first or second) that functions as actor/subject of the sentence. Positive evidence was found for the hypotheses. It is concluded from the present study, as well as from a previous study (Issidorides, 1988), that linguistically more complex input will not necessarily impede comprehension. The fact that normative speakers have difficulties in producing a certain grammatical structure (e.g., the AdvVSO structure) does not imply that such a structure is also more difficult to understand in the speech of others.

This study examined the spoken English development of a hearing child of deaf parents who used American Sign Language (ASL). The child first learned ASL in interactions with his parents and later developed spoken English outside the home environment. It was hypothesized that the child's acquisition of spoken English would systematically reflect both expected monolingual developmental patterns and interlinguistic transfer. Four areas of mismatch between ASL and spoken English were identified. Language sample data from ages 2;9–5;2 were examined for evidence to evaluate the hypotheses. Features that reflected the simultaneous versus sequential mismatch between ASL and English, undifferentiated versus differentiated aspects, free versus bound morpheme mechanisms, and word-order differences provided evidence of ASL influence on spoken English acquisition. Although not extensive, ASL appears to have exerted consistent influence on several areas of the child's spoken English development.

Two experiments in which 2 closed-head-injured (CHI) subjects and 12 non-brain-damaged control subjects took part investigated the capacity to comprehend indirect speech acts. In the first experiment, the subjects were required to interpret conventional indirect speech acts. One CHI subject, but not the other, had trouble rejecting the literal meaning. In the second experiment, the subjects were required to interpret the meaning behind two literally conflicting sentences. While the control subjects interpreted these as representing a sarcastic exchange, the CHI subjects were unable to provide an adequate explanation. The results were interpreted in terms of common cognitive deficits after closed head injury.

This study examines patterns of transfer in the sentence processing strategies displayed by Chinese-English and English–Chinese bilinguals. Our results indicate that late bilinguals display strong evidence for forward transfer: late Chinese–English bilinguals transfer animacybased strategies to English sentences; late English–Chinese bilinguals transfer English-like word order strategies to Chinese. Early bilinguals display a variety of transfer patterns, including differentiation (use of animacy strategies in Chinese and word order strategies in English) and backward transfer (use of L2 processing strategies in L1, a possible symptom of language loss). These unusual transfer patterns reflect a complex interaction of variables, including age of exposure to L2 and patterns of daily language use. Implications of these findings for the critical period hypothesis are discussed, together with some new hypotheses concerning the interaction between acquisition of L2 and maintenance of L1.

It has been suggested that manual sign systems designed to represent English are unlearnable because they are not natural languages. In order to examine this premise, the present study examines reading achievement and expressive English skills of 13 profoundly deaf students, aged 7;1 to 14;8, who were educated using only a manually coded English (MCE) sign system. Linguistic structures selected for analysis were designed to reflect unique characteristics of English, as well as those common to English and American Sign Language, and to obtain a broad picture of English skills. Results showed that the deaf students had expressive English skills comparable to a hearing control group for some features of English that reflected syntactic and lexical skills. They showed substantial deficits in inflectional morphological skills that were not predictive of the complexity of their language. The results reveal which aspects of MCE appear to be learnable and which appear problematic for deaf students.

This study looked at the effects of feedback (explicit correction) on the learning of morphological generalizations in an experimental setting. Subjects Were 79 adult native speakers of English with intermediate (39) and advanced (40) levels of proficiency in French. All subjects were individually trained on two rules of French suffixation. Experimental subjects received correction if they gave erroneous responses to stimuli in a “feedback” session. Afterward, all subjects “guessed” responses to novel stimuli and were retested (twice) on the feedback items. Comparison subjects dealt with the same stimuli but were never corrected. Analyses of feedback responses indicated differences in favor of the experimental groups, but comparisons of guessing responses between experimental and comparison groups showed no evidence of learned generalizations. The learning of absolute exceptions was more likely among advanced learners.

This is an investigation of the relationships among selected aspects of normal language development, emerging metalinguistic skills, and concepts about print in 3-year-old children. Forty–three normally developing children were given four tests of language development; twelve metalinguistic tasks measuring phonological awareness, word awareness, and structural awareness; and two measures of literacy knowledge. The results clearly demonstrated that most 3-year-olds can make metalinguistic judgments and productions in structured tasks, with overall metalinguistic performance improving with age in months. Specific metalinguistic tasks varied in difficulty and probably in developmental order. The major domains of metalinguistic awareness (phonological, word, and structural) were significantly intercorrelated and also correlated with overall linguistic skill. Literacy knowledge was positively correlated with overall metalinguistic skill and, specifically, with phonological awareness. It is concluded that, as young as age 3, children are already rapidly developing a mental framework for analyzing language structure separately from language meaning

The adequacy of 11 metrics for measuring linguistic complexity was evaluated by applying each metric to language samples obtained from 30 different adult speakers, aged 60–90 years. The analysis then determined how well each metric indexed age-group differences in complexity. In addition, individual differences in the complexity of adults' language were examined as a function of these complexity metrics using structural equation modeling techniques. In a follow-up study, judges listened to sentences in noise, rated their comprehensibility, and attempted to recall each sentence verbatim. Hierarchical multiple regression was used to evaluate the structural equation model, derived from the language samples, with respect to sentence comprehensibility and recall. While most of the metrics provided an adequate account of age-group and individual differences in complexity, the amount of embedding and the type of embedding proved to predict how easily sentences are understood and how accurately they are recalled.

The unintelligible speech of many developmentally delayed children poses problems for language intervention and language assessment efforts. Eighteen developmentally delayed children in Brown's (1973) stage I and their parents participated in two studies of the relationship between verbal routines and the intelligibility of developmentally delayed children's speech. The first study demonstrated that more intelligible child speech was found in routines than in nonroutines. To determine if routine utterances were articulated more accurately than nonroutine utterances, the second study extracted a representative sample of routine and nonroutine utterances from their visual and discourse contexts and asked two naive observers to transcribe them. To investigate the possible effect of contextual information, the naive observers transcribed the extracted utterances under context-information-present and context-information- absent conditions. The results indicated that extracted utterances were more intelligible under context-information-present conditions. The results were interpreted as indicating that child speech was more intelligible in routines than nonroutines because routines provide adults with more context information for interpreting ambiguous child utterances.

This article addresses native monolingual American and Mandarin Chinese incipiently bilingual children's ability to detect and identify inter- and intraword boundaries. Two hypotheses are reported: first, that young children will demonstrate similar patterns in their segmentation behavior, and that there will be a developmental progression in this behavior; and second, that Mandarin Chinese subjects learning to read Chinese and English simultaneously will segment English words more readily into syllables than American subjects, treating them as Chinese monosyllables (C)V(C). Although results partially support the first hypothesis, no group main effect was found. However, when the same subjects' intraword segmentation patterns were further analyzed to probe their awareness of adult phonological constraints while spontaneously segmenting words into (C)VC or CV(C) units, there was evidence of difference in group segmentation patterns. With time, though, the bilingual subjects appear to develop nativeike phonological constraints.

This study investigated the role of word class and gender during lexical access in language production. It was predicted that word class would constrain lexical access because it acts as the interface between the syntax and the lexicon. Gender, in contrast, should not constrain lexical access because it is a linguistic category that does not correlate with any semantic or syntactic information. These predictions were tested against contextual and noncontextual word substitution errors in a corpus of German slips of the tongue, as well as against verbal paraphasias produced by a German-speaking aphasic patient. The results indicated that in all three subsets, both word class and gender influenced the search through the mental lexicon to a reliable degree, with word class making a greater impact than gender. The model that best captured the empirical effects centered around the distinction between prelexical and postlexical features, assigning word class to the former and gender to the latter group. This distinction could be most naturally implemented in a parallel-interactive processing network. The creation of nodes and connections in this type of model was shown not only to respect functional principles, but also to occur on purely structural grounds. On the assumption that the information would be transmitted more or less reliably from one node to another, the aphasiological and speech error data could be readily accommodated within the same psycholinguistic model.