BACKGROUND Specific Language Impairment (SLI) is a neurodevelopmental disorder affecting language acquisition in the absence of frank neurological damage, hearing deficits, severe environmental deprivation, or mental retardation. Children with SLI have significant difficulties in syntax domain of language compared to semantics, while their acquisition of pragmatics is relatively spared. PURPO...

A basic idea of the transformational tradition is that constituents move. More recently, there has been a trend towards the view that all features are lexical features. And in recent “minimalist” grammars, structure building operations are assumed to be feature driven. A simple grammar formalism with these properties is presented here and briefly explored. Grammars in this formalism can define ...

The paper motivates a strategy for identification and annotation of derivational relations in the Bulgarian wordnet that aims at coping with the complex morphology of the language in an elegant way. Our method involves transfer of the Princeton WordNet (morpho)semantic relations into the Bulgarian wordnet, at the level of the synset, and further detection of derivational relations between liter...

The generation of complex derived word forms has been an overlooked problem in NLP; we fill this gap by applying neural sequence-to-sequence models to the task. We overview the theoretical motivation for a paradigmatic treatment of derivational morphology, and introduce the task of derivational paradigm completion as a parallel to inflectional paradigm completion. State-of-the-art neural models...

This paper puts forward a new explanation for the development of the Austronesian voice system. I argue that both voice marking and the nominalizing function of the affixes are present already at the Proto-Austronesian stage and propose that these affixes ultimately go back to reflexive markers (which further developed into intransitive markers) and prepositions. I offer a historical explanatio...

This paper investigates how morphological relationships between inflected word forms are represented in the mental lexicon focusing on paradigmatic relations between regularly inflected word forms and relationships between different stem forms of the same lexeme. We present results from a series of psycholinguistic experiments investigating German adjectives (which are inflected for case, numbe...

The research explored the effect of morphemic analysis awareness on ESL secondary school students’ vocabulary acquisition. The quasi-experimental study was conducted with 100 ESL secondary school students in two experimental groups (inflectional and derivational) and one control group. The students’ vocabulary acquisition was assessed through two measures: Morph-Analysis Test and Morph-Vocabula...

The present study examined the development of morphological awareness and its contribution to vocabulary and reading comprehension among young Chinese-speaking English language learners (ELLs). We focused on two aspects of morphological awareness: derivational awareness and compound awareness. Participants included 46 kindergarteners (younger cohort) and 34 first graders (older cohort) of Chine...