Wrong place, wrong time: Children’s sensitivity to present tense spelling conventions

Spelling has been found to be influenced by the frequency with which certain orthographic patterns occur. We examined whether Grades 2–5 children were already sensitive to orthographic frequency in spelling present tense verb inflections that sound the same but are spelled differently. Children were asked to spell present tenses in two homophonous forms; both inflections are pronounced with final /t/ but are spelled with final -d (“ik vind,” I find) or -dt (“hij/zij vindt,” he/she finds). Previous research has shown that adolescents and adults make inflection errors based on the relative frequency within a pair; as “vind’ is more frequent than “vindt,” “vind” is often used incorrectly. The children showed low correct scores for third person singular spellings, and overall better performance for -d dominant verbs. Surprisingly, they did make errors related to homophone inflection but in the wrong place, marking the wrong time: homophone-based errors occurred in present tense non-homophone verbs and in past tenses. We take our findings to mean that the children were not sensitive to homophone dominance. Furthermore, the findings illustrate the importance of specific graphotactic patterns in literacy development and call for attention to these patterns in models and teaching of spelling.

Verb + verb sequences in Dravidian

This chapter analyzes compound verb constructions in the Dravidian language family. Drawing on data from all four subgroups, two broad constructions emerge: auxiliary compound verbs and lexical compound verbs. The former provide complex morphosyntactic vehicles for verbal categories or combinations of categories not found in the simple verb inflections of a language; the latter provide similar vehicles to encode lexical meanings not found in simple lexemes of the language. A third construction, reduplicated compounds, is also analyzed. A brief comparison in made between the pattern of these verb + verb sequences in Dravidian and patterns found in other language families.

Persons and Address Terms in Melanesia

This chapter deals with vocative and address terms of the several Melanesian languages and tries to investigate the grammatical and sociolinguistic characteristics of them. This study is a contrastive study of the six languages which are spoken in Papua New Guinea (Amele, Bel, and Tok Pisin) and Vanuatu (South Efate, Nguna, and Bislama). This study tries to clarify the characteristics of their lexicon (mainly kinship and address terms) and usages of personal pronouns and their verb inflections. Generally, the sample languages are rich in usages of these terms (kinship, personal pronouns, vocatives) whereas creole languages have limited usages and borrowed from English lexicon. Finally, this study claims that there are several rules of defining social relations and their grammatical forms.

Exploring the acquisition of verb inflections in Japanese: A probabilistic analysis of seven adult–child corpora

The acquisition of verb morphology is often studied using categorical criteria for determining the productivity of a morpheme. Applying this approach to Japanese, an agglutinative language, this study finds no consistent order for morpheme acquisition and that productivity could be explained by sampling effects. To examine morpheme acquisition using more graded measures of productivity, the authors compared various regression models for predicting the age of acquisition of 311 verb forms across a large combined corpus of seven Japanese-speaking children (aged 1;1–5;1). Complex forms were learned earlier than frequency-matched simple forms, and morpheme ending identity explained substantial variation. Both of these findings suggest that children have some segmented morphemes and have learned some of their semantic/pragmatic characteristics. Sampling would predict that verb form acquisition would be sensitive to lemma and ending frequency, but acquisition was also sensitive to aspects of input frequency that were independent of these factors, and this suggests that children are encoding whole verb forms in addition to creating forms with compositional morphological rules.

Recast type, repair, and acquisition in AAC mediated interaction

The present study investigated the effects of different types of recasts and prompts on the rate of repair and spontaneous use of novel vocabulary by eight children with severe motor speech disabilities who used speech-generating technologies to communicate. Data came from 60 transcripts of clinical sessions that were part of a conversation-based intervention designed to teach them pronouns, verbs, and verb inflections. The results showed that, when presented alone, interrogative choice and declarative recasts led to the highest rates of child repair. The results also showed that when children were presented with recasts and prompts to repair, the rate of repair increased. Spontaneous use of linguistic targets was significantly and positively related to conversational sequences where the adult recast was followed by child repair. These findings suggest that using different recast types and prompts to repair may be beneficial for spontaneous use of linguistic targets in this population.

ERRORS IN QQ ONLINE CHATTING: A STUDY ON CHINESE ESL LEARNERS IN INDONESIAN UNIVERSITY

This study intends to investigate errors found in an online written platform used by Chinese students in English Language Education Department. The online platform observed in this study was QQ chatting, where students freely and without pressure utilize the application for everyday English communication. Most Chinese students have performed unorganized sentence patterns, resulting in meaning breakdown. This study employed qualitative case study design with five Chinese respondents. The researchers were actively involved in the QQ chatting as the participants; the discussion topics revolved around everyday communication topics, namely academic life, friendship, social interaction, and culture challenges. The data then were recorded weekly for one semester and analyzed through manuscript analysis from the recorded captures of the conversations. The findings suggest that there were various types of errors performed by Chinese students: omission, misformation, addition, misordering, and mixed-types. The most prominent one was omission with the total of twenty-eight times occurrence. The omission errors were divided into omission of nouns as in ‘today have sunshine’, omission of verbs as in ‘I don’t know here will so cold’, omission of auxiliary verbs as in ‘I eaten dinner’ and omission of verb inflections as in ‘Where are you go?’.The most commonly found omissions errors were due to the influence of Chinese first language where the speakers have totally different tenses and sentence organization with English.

ERRORS IN QQ ONLINE CHATTING: A STUDY ON CHINESE ESL LEARNERS IN INDONESIAN UNIVERSITY

This study intends to investigate errors found in an online written platform used by Chinese students in English Language Education Department. The online platform observed in this study was QQ chatting, where students freely and without pressure utilize the application for everyday English communication. Most Chinese students have performed unorganized sentence patterns, resulting in meaning breakdown. This study employed qualitative case study design with five Chinese respondents. The researchers were actively involved in the QQ chatting as the participants; the discussion topics revolved around everyday communication topics, namely academic life, friendship, social interaction, and culture challenges. The data then were recorded weekly for one semester and analyzed through manuscript analysis from the recorded captures of the conversations. The findings suggest that there were various types of errors performed by Chinese students: omission, misformation, addition, misordering, and mixed-types. The most prominent one was omission with the total of twenty-eight times occurrence. The omission errors were divided into omission of nouns as in ‘today have sunshine’, omission of verbs as in ‘I don’t know here will so cold’, omission of auxiliary verbs as in ‘I eaten dinner’ and omission of verb inflections as in ‘Where are you go?’.The most commonly found omissions errors were due to the influence of Chinese first language where the speakers have totally different tenses and sentence organization with English.