This study tested the hypothesis that certain sound substitutions in older, normally developing children are perceptually based substitutions, typified by poor discrimination, while others are phonetic substitutions – phonemic distinctions that are maintained by the child in a phonetically non-adult fashion. The perception and production of English voiceless fricatives in twelve normally developing monolingual children aged 3;2–5;6 was investigated using a picture-pointing task, audio recordings, and acoustic analysis. Results include significant correlations between production and perception scores for /θ/ but not /s/ and significant acoustic differences in substitutions of [θ] for /s/ (versus productions of [θ] for /θ/) but not in substitutions of [f] or [s] for /θ/. It is suggested that substitutions for /θ/, with the correlated poor discrimination, may indicate a non-adult phonemic representation, while substitutions for /s/ tend to have a motoric basis in older children. Stages in the acquisition of /θ/ are hypothesized.

In this study we compared two methods for teaching grammatical exceptions in the foreign language classroom. Thirty-nine students in two sections of an introductory college French course served as subjects. Eight target structures, exemplifying “exceptions to a rule,” were randomly assigned to one of two teaching conditions for a section taught in the spring; each structure was assigned to the opposite teaching condition for a section taught the following fall. In one condition we simply taught the students the exception as an exception. In the other – what we called the Garden Path condition – we presented canonical exemplars encouraging students to induce the rule; we then asked them to generate the form (which we knew to be an exception) and then corrected their resulting overgeneralization error. Analysis of subsequent formal testing showed that students learned the exception better in the Garden Path condition and that this advantage persisted throughout the semesterlong course. We hypothesized that this technique helped students to focus attention both on the rule and on the features of the particular structure that marked it as an exception.

This study investigated students' knowledge of derivational morphology and the relationship between this knowledge and their ability to spell derived words. The subjects (fourth, sixth and eighth graders) were given the Wide Range Achievement Test, Spelling subtest, and experimental tests of their ability to generate base and derived forms orally, to spell the same base and derived words, and to apply suffix addition rules. The results indicate strong developmental trends in both the mastery of derivational morphology and the spelling of derived words; however, spelling performances lagged significantly behind the ability to generate the same words. Success generating and spelling derived words depended on the complexity of transformations between base and derived forms. Further, mastery of phonological and orthographic transformations most strongly distinguished the three grades in both spelling and generating derived words. Indications that the older students were using knowledge of morphemic structure in spelling derived words were found in analysis of the spelling of base and derived word pairs and the application of suffix addition rules.

This article reports a single case study of a brain-damaged subject who presented with impaired performance on tasks involving production of verbal numbers (i.e., numbers in the form of words, such as eighty-six). Lexical errors occurred in spoken production but not in written production. Syntactic errors, however, occurred in both production modes. This pattern of performance provides empirical support for assumptions about the componential structure of the normal number processing system.