Production of the morpheme BE was studied among 22 children (ages 4-5) with and without specific language impairment (SLI). Contractible contexts were produced more accurately than uncontractible contexts by both groups, and there were no significant interactions between language status and contractibility. Copula forms were produced more…

Provides a review of current research on the relevance of morphological awareness to reading and reading instruction. Discusses children's development of awareness of the morphemic structure of words and the need for children to learn strategies that will help them read, spell, and understand morphologically complex words. Concludes that educators…

Examines the relationship between adult recasts of child utterances and the child's acquisition of syntactic structures. Results indicate that maternal recasts of specific morphemes were related to the acquisition of those specific morphemes during certain developmental periods, whereas other grammatical morphemes were facilitated by expansions…

Spontaneous language samples from 15 Mexican-American monolingual Spanish-speaking children between the ages of two and five were analyzed for the acquisition sequence of 10 morphemes: demonstratives, articles, copulas, and the regular present indicative; followed by irregular present indicative, regular preterite indicative, plurals, possessive…

Presents a psycholinguistic experiment focusing on whether common phonological alterations play a role in native speakers' perceptions of whether two words share a morpheme. Results indicate they are a significant factor in speakers' perceptions of morphemic relatedness. These findings show that phonological generalizations are psychologically…

Two experiments investigated morphological decomposition in ambiguous novel compounds such as "busheater," which can be parsed as either "bus-heater" or "bush-heater." It was found that subjects' parsing choices for such words are influenced by orthographic constraints but that these constraints do not operate…

This investigation examined the possibility that features necessary for morphology, such as person and number, are absent from the underlying grammars of specifically language-impaired children. (46 references) (JL)

A longitudinal study of 43 typical children (ages 2 to 8) and 21 children with specific language impairments (SLI) found that a diverse set of morphemes share the property of tense marking, that acquisition shows linear and nonlinear components, and that mean length of utterance predicts rate of acquisition. (Author/CR)

Compares morphological processing of skilled and less skilled Dutch readers. Focuses on the role of prefixes as access units in visual word recognition. Finds evidence for differential use of prefix information in undergraduate students and elementary school children. Concludes that the information accessed by prefixes is semantically combined…

Examines the structural consequences of the contact between Dutch overseers and Eastern slaves during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the formation of Berbice Dutch, an unusual Creole because of its remarkably homogeneous substrate. (Author/VWL)

A study examined the extent to which linguistic variation in the English language might have been affecting the performance of 160 rural preschoolers in South Carolina. When dialectal variations were not considered, the performance of the children differed from that of the normative populations on tests that assessed grammatical morphemes.…

An ongoing debate in Arabic morphology concerns the nature of the smallest unit governing lexical organization and representation in this language. A standard model maintains that Arabic words are typically analyzable into a three-consonantal root morpheme carrying the core meaning of words and a prosodic template responsible mostly for…

The Malay language has a transparent morphological system and, unlike English, it is written in a very shallow alphabetic-syllabic script. We predicted that beginner spellers (six-to eight-year-olds) of this Rumi script would encode words at the level of the syllable and morpheme, rather than the phoneme. Using the results of a 75-item spelling…

The purpose of this study was to assess phonological and morphosyntactic change in children with co-occurring speech and language impairments using different goal attack strategies. Participants included 47 preschoolers, ages 3;0 (years;months) to 5;11, with impairments in both speech and language: 40 children in the experimental group and 7 in a…

Despite the common use of mean length of utterance (MLU) as a diagnostic measure, what it actually reflects in terms of linguistic knowledge is relatively unclear. This study explored the extent to which variance in MLU could be accounted for by a measure of expressive vocabulary and a measure of morphosyntax in a group of 44 typically-developing…