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.

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.

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 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 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.