The purpose of this study was to determine whether the reading comprehension of deaf and hearing subjects was affected by the presence of idiomatic language in passages.The Test Of Idioms was constructed to determine the effect of idiomatic language on reading comprehension. It consisted of twelve passages. The four forms differed in the presence or absence of idiomatic language. The Test Of Idioms was evaluated by three judges. Form A and Form D were piloted to standardize the directions for administration and to assess the reliability of the instrument. The reliability for Form A was .93 and .89 for Form D.The subjects in this study were 54 students at the Indiana School for the Deaf who were prelingually, profoundly deaf and had no other handicapping conditions. The hearing subjects consisted of 91 students from the New Castle Community School System who were in grades three or four, had never been retained and had no handicapping conditions. Both deaf and hearing subjects were randomly assigned to take one of the four forms of the Test Of Idioms.The following results were obtained. The deaf subjects did not differ significantly across groups in their ability to comprehend passages with varying levels of idiomatic language. The hearing subjects did not differ significantly across groups in their ability to comprehend passages containing varying levels of idiomatic language. In addition, within groups the deaf and hearing subjects did not differ in their comprehension of passages as a function of the ability or inability to define the idioms contained in the passages.The findings of the study were interpreted to mean that when idioms are embedded in passages where sufficient contextual support is available and extraneous factors are controlled, comprehension is not impaired for deaf or hearing subjects. In addition ability to define an idiom is not an accurate predictor of comprehension ability for reading materials containing idiomatic language.

In this thesis, I argue that early child second language (L2) grammars allow truncation, on a par with proposals by Rizzi (1993/1994) and Haegeman (1995) for first language (L1) acquisition. This account (the Truncation Hypothesis) holds that Rizzi's (1994) Root Principle, according to which root declaratives are CPs, is initially underspecified in L2 systems (for processing reasons). This means that the root of main declaratives will not systematically be CP. Instead, different types of roots should be projected, such as CP, IP or VP, with VP underlying root infinitives. If one further assumes that functional categories are present in early grammars, the possibility of truncation can thus account for optionality of verb-movement and finiteness in early SLA, and more generally for why such categories seem to be optionally projected initially (Vainikka & Young-Scholten, 1994; 1996; Eubank, 1992; 1993/1994; 1996). / Predictions based on the Truncation Hypothesis were tested against longitudinal spontaneous production data from child and adult L2 learners. There were two child and two adult learners of L2 French (whose L1s were English and Arabic) and two child two adult learners of L2 German (native speakers of Romance pro-drop languages). The findings suggest that the distribution of finite and nonfinite verbs is structurally determined in L2 child grammar, i.e. tenseless verbs only appear when VP is the root, while finite verbs are found when functional categories are projected. This in turn means that children project truncated structures in early L2 acquisition. I argue that no other theory of the nature of early L2 grammars is able to account for the full range of properties of the child L2 data. / The adult data are less conclusive concerning the possibility of truncation in adult L2 grammars. In particular, the learners seem to use infinitival markers as substitutes for finite inflections, which means that nonfinite verbs are found in contexts which are not predicted by the Truncation Hypothesis. The difference between the child and adult learners is attributed to problems that adults may have in mapping the syntactic and morphological systems (Lardiere, 1996), and not to a discrepancy in syntactic knowledge.

No description available.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2007. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed Feb. 29, 2008). Directed by Stuart Marcovitch; submitted to the Dept. of Psychology. Includes bibliographical references (p. 44-48).

Thesis (M. Communication Pathology)--University of Pretoria, 2006. / Summary in English and Afrikaans. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2008. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 137-149). Also available online in Scholars' Bank; and in ProQuest, free to University of Oregon users.

Thesis (M.A.)--Kent State University, 2006. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed June 12, 2007). Advisor: William E. Merriman. Keywords: language development, language, word learning, form, function, shape bias, function neglect. Includes survey instruments. Includes bibliographical references (p. 35-39).

Thesis(M.S.)--Auburn University, 2006. / Abstract. Vita. Includes bibliographic references (p.73-80).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1997. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [101]-108).

Thesis (B.Sc)--University of Hong Kong, 2005. / "A dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Bachelor of Science (Speech and Hearing Sciences), The University of Hong Kong, June 30, 2005." Also available in print.