The purpose of this analysis was to define norms for grammatical morpheme development in Spanish for Spanish-English bilingual children ages 4;0-7;6 relative to their use of Spanish. This study uses secondary data analysis based on two existing datasets. Participants included 334 Spanish-English bilingual children that were recruited from school districts in Texas, Utah, and Pennsylvania. Grammatical morpheme accuracy was determined by performance on the BESA (Bilingual English Spanish Assessment) (Peña, Gutiérrez-Clellen et al., in preparation). Percentage of current use of Spanish was estimated based on a parental interview in which parents estimated children language input and output. The average percent accuracy of grammatical morphemes was calculated and analyzed as a function of current use of Spanish and of chronological age. Results show that the percentage of accurately produced morphemes has a general upward trend as Spanish use and age increases. These findings will help define expectations for bilingual children that in turn can inform the development of intervention goals. / text

The largest group of English language learners in the United States is comprised individuals who speak Spanish as a first language. There is a growing need for speech-language pathologists to better understand the language development of children learning two languages in order to distinguish between typical and disordered communication with this population. For monolingual English speakers, rate of grammatical morpheme acquisition is typically predicted based on MLU. In bilingual children, current language use has been determined to be a potentially more useful predictor of language performance. The purpose of this study was to determine English grammatical morpheme performance for English-Spanish bilingual preschool-age children based on their language exposure. Data was drawn from two existing data sets that included a total of 314 children. Their performance on the BESA was analyzed for grammatical morphemes in English. Interviews were conducted to determine language use and exposure. We present patterns of English grammatical morpheme acquisition in bilingual children as related to current language use. / text

Although there are many studies about the relationship between grammar and lexicon, there is a lack of studies examining the relationship between the growth of compound words and complex sentences. This study examined the relationship between compound words at the lexical level, and complex sentences, auxiliaries and modals, and coordinated subjects/objects at the grammatical level, for both brain-injured and typically developing children between the ages 4 and 6. For 10 typically developing children, 3091 utterances, and for 18 brain-injured children, 6460 utterances were examined. The results revealed that both groups showed a significant increase in the use of compound words and coordinated clauses. The growth of auxiliary and modal verbs is significant only for typically developing children and the growth of subordinate clauses is significant just for brain injured children. Moreover, there is an interaction between the growth of coordinate clauses and compound words just for brain injured children.

Matéq is an Austronesian language of the Land Dayak (Bidayuhic) subgroup spoken by around 10,000–20,000 people in West Kalimantan (Borneo), Indonesia. This thesis presents a sketch grammar of the language based on linguistic fieldwork conducted from September 2012 to January 2013. Topics discussed in the sketch grammar include the geographic and social context of the Matéq language, its phonology and elements of its morphosyntax. Major features of Matéq phonology include the presence of both plain and prenasalised plosives, geminate nasals, and nasal vowels that contrast with oral vowels in certain positions. In terms of morphosyntax, this study shows that Matéq has two sets of personal pronouns which encode information about the generational relationships between speech participants or referents. With respect to grammatical voice, findings suggest that Matéq has five distinct voice constructions which can be distinguished on the basis of their morphosyntactic and semantic properties. Each voice construction also tends to have different pragmatic and TAM associations. This study also shows that Matéq has optional subject marking with certain verbs, and has both continuous and discontinuous serial verb constructions.

This dissertation investigates interactions between gender and number and gender and evaluative morphology in a sample of 100 African languages, and provides a method for assessing the role that these interactions play in the grammatical complexity of gender systems. The dissertation is organised around three research foci. First, the dissertation surveys patterns of interaction between gender and number along the following dimensions: exponence, syncretism, indexation, correlations in type of marking, and gender assignment. The study provides evidence for the possibility that nominal features are organised in a relevance hierarchy. In addition, the study shows that animacy and lexical plurality play a crucial role in the distribution of special patterns of plural indexation. The study also shows that pervasive indexation systems in the language sample always involve both gender and number. Finally, the study shows how gender assignment can be used as a means for encoding variation in the countability properties of nouns and noun phrases. Second, the dissertation surveys patterns of interaction between gender and evaluative morphology in the languages of the sample. Two types of interactions are found. The study shows that the distribution of the two types depends on three factors: the type of gender system, the number of gender distinctions and the possibility of assigning a noun to more than one gender. Third, the dissertation investigates the role that interactions of gender and number and gender and evaluative morphology play in the absolute complexity of gender. The study proposes a metric for gender complexity and uses this metric to compute complexity scores for the languages of the sample. The results suggest that the gender systems of the language sample lean toward high complexity, that genealogically related languages have the same or similar complexity scores, and that the distribution of the outliers can often be understood as the result of language contact.

Although there are many studies about the relationship between grammar and lexicon, there is a lack of studies examining the relationship between the growth of compound words and complex sentences. This study examined the relationship between compound words at the lexical level, and complex sentences, auxiliaries and modals, and coordinated subjects/objects at the grammatical level, for both brain-injured and typically developing children between the ages 4 and 6. For 10 typically developing children, 3091 utterances, and for 18 brain-injured children, 6460 utterances were examined. The results revealed that both groups showed a significant increase in the use of compound words and coordinated clauses. The growth of auxiliary and modal verbs is significant only for typically developing children and the growth of subordinate clauses is significant just for brain injured children. Moreover, there is an interaction between the growth of coordinate clauses and compound words just for brain injured children.

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Grammatical Evolution (GE) is a method of utilising a general purpose evolutionary algorithm to ???evolve??? programs written in an arbitrary BNF grammar. This thesis extends GE as follows: GE as an extension of Genetic Programming (GP) A novel method of automatically extracting information from the grammar is introduced. This additional information allows the use of GP style crossover which in turn allows GE to perform identically to a strongly typed GP system as well as a non-typed (or canonical) GP system. Two test problems are presented one which is more easily solved by the GP style crossover and one which favours the tradition GE ???Ripple Crossover???. With this new crossover operator GE can now emulate GP (as well as retaining its own unique features) and can therefore now be seen as an extension of GP. Dynamically Defined Functions An extension to the BNF grammar is presented which allows the use of dynamically defined functions (DDFs). DDFs provide an alternative to the traditional approach of Automatically Defined Functions (ADFs) but have the advantage that the number of functions and their parameters do not need to be specified by the user in advance. In addition DDFs allow the architecture of individuals to change dynamically throughout the course of the run without requiring the introduction of any new form of operator. Experimental results are presented confirming the effectiveness of DDFs. Self-Selecting (or variable) crossover. A self-selecting operator is introduced which allows the system to determine, during the course of the run, which crossover operator to apply; this is tested over several problem domains and (especially where small populations are used) is shown to be effective in aiding the system to overcome local optima. Spatial Co-Evolution in Age Layered Planes (SCALP) A method of combining Hornby???s ALPS metaheuristic and a spatial co-evolution system used by Mitchell is presented; the new SCALP system is tested over three problem domains of increasing difficulty and performs extremely well in each of them.

abstract: Differentiating bilingual children with primary language impairment (PLI) from those with typical development in the process of learning a second language has been a challenge. Studies have focused on improving the diagnostic accuracy of language measures for bilinguals. However, researchers are faced with two main challenges when estimating the diagnostic accuracy of new measures: (a) using an a priori diagnosis of children (children with and without PLI), as a reference may introduce error given there is no gold standard for the a priori classification; and (b) classifying children into only two groups may be another source of error given evidence that there may be more than two language ability groups with different strengths and weaknesses or, alternatively, a single group characterized by a continuum of language performance. The current study tested for the number of distinct language ability groups and their characteristics in predominately Spanish-speaking children in the U.S. without using an a priori classification as a reference. In addition, the study examined to what extent the latent groups differed on each measure, and the stability of language ability groups across three assessment methods in Spanish (standardized tests, language sample analyses, and comprehensive assessment), taking in to account English and non-verbal cognitive skills. The study included 431 bilingual children attending English-only education. Three latent profile analyses were conducted, one for each method of assessment. Results suggested more than two distinct language ability groups in the population with the method of assessment influencing the number and characteristics of the groups. Specifically, four groups were estimated based on the comprehensive assessment, and three based on standardized assessment or language sample analysis in Spanish. The stability of the groups was high on average, particularly between the comprehensive assessment and the standardized measures. Results indicate that an a priori classification of children into two groups, those with and without PLI, could lead to misclassification, depending on the measures used. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Speech and Hearing Science 2012

Northern Mao is an endangered Afroasiatic-Omotic language of western Ethiopia with fewer than 5,000 speakers. This study is a comprehensive grammar of the language, written from a functional/typological perspective which embraces historical change as an explanation for synchronic structure. The grammar introduces the Northern Mao people, aspects of their culture and history, and the major aspects of the language: contrastive phonology, tone phenomena, nouns, pronouns, demonstratives, numerals, noun phrases, verbs and verbal morphology, single verb constructions, non-final/medial clauses, subordinate clauses and alignment. The tone system has three contrastive levels, where the Mid tones subdivide into two classes which historically derive from two different sources. Nouns each exhibit two tonal melodies: one melody in citation form or other unmodified environments and another melody when syntactically modified. Extensive coverage is given to developments in the pronominal and subject-marking systems as well as the verbal system. In the pronominal and subject marking systems, innovations include the development of a dual opposition, the fusion of an affirmative verbal prefix to subject prefixes, and the development of these subject prefixes into new pronouns. In the verbal system, innovations include the development of new verbal wordforms from subordinate + final verb periphrastic constructions and a set of new subject markers from an old subordinator morpheme. The verbal system is oriented around two oppositional relations: realis vs. irrealis and finite vs. infinitive verb forms. Realis and irrealis verbs have distinct item-arrangement patterns: realis verbs take subject prefixes while irrealis verbs take subject suffixes. Realis is associated with affirmative polarity and non-future tense and may be used with many aspectual distinctions. Irrealis is associated with negative polarity, future tense, and counterfactual constructions; irrealis verbs do not express many aspectual distinctions. Finite versus infinitive verb stems are differentiated by tone. Finite verb stems are used in affirmative declarative and interrogative utterances, non-final/medial constructions and the more finite subordinate clause structures. Infinitive verb stems are used in negative declarative and interrogative utterances, non-final/medial constructions and the less finite subordinate clause structures. The work concludes with a summary of cross-constructional alignment patterns and evaluates the efficacy of a marked-nominative analysis.