Even though recently appeared reference grammars of lesser-known languages usually do pay attention to issues to do with wordhood, studies of the theoretical and typological import of wordhood-related questions in indigenous languages of the Americas are not numerous. This publication aims to address the challenges posed by individual phenomena found in the Americas to the received views of wordhood.

Like other Germanic languages, Frisian has both strong and weak verbal inflection. Despite a strong diachronic tendency for change towards weak inflection, strong inflection patterns are available synchronically to speakers to form the past tense and past participle of new or nonce verbs. Using a measure for ‘potential productivity’ developed by Knooihuizen and Strik (Folia Linguist Hist 35:173–200, 2014) for Dutch, we investigate the relative strength of available patterns in Frisian in an elicitation and an acceptability judgment experiment. Despite the multitude of different patterns in the strong verbal inflection system, strong inflection makes up 35% of the elicited nonce forms; these forms cannot all be explained by analogy. Analogically formed strong inflections of nonce verbs receive relatively high acceptability ratings at 4.2 on a 7-point scale. The elicitation experiment also produced many weak forms (12% of participles) that are not normatively possible with the -e infinitives in the elicitation prompt. These alternative weak forms were not included in the acceptability judgment experiment. We discuss the experimental results in the context of diachronically attested language change in Frisian and of intensive language contact with Dutch.

The present chapter explores both the cognitive and linguistic development of bilingual children with and without Specific Language Impairment (SLI), and focuses on Spanish and Catalan languages. We first describe some similarities between Monolingual and Bilingual language acquisition and how Bilingual children reach most of the milestones at the same age as monolinguals, despite having less exposure to each language separately. We refer to different characteristics of simultaneous bilingual language acquisition and discuss some variables that influence this process, such as the linguistic and non-linguistic characteristics that influence bilingual language acquisition and proficiency. One such variable is the status of each language in the social context. We highlight the advantages and disadvantages of being bilingual when compared with monolinguals in cognitive tasks related to information access and storage in long-term memory. We present several studies describing the development of monolingual children with SLI to establish a basis for comparing bilingual children with SLI. We mention some studies which have explored cognitive abilities in bilingual children with SLI; some studies finding compensating abilities and some others finding a “bilingual disadvantage”. We show several studies with different outcomes depending on the type of bilingualism, such as the differences between sequential bilinguals as compared to simultaneous bilingual children. Finally, we present a series of studies that have investigated phonological, morphosyntactic, lexical-semantic and pragmatic characteristics of bilingual Spanish-Catalan development in children with and without SLI. Executive functions related to both cognitive and language processing in bilingual Spanish-Catalan acquisition are also shown. The chapter ends with some research which have analyzed reading abilities and social interaction in this population.

In traditional word-and-paradigm models of morphology, an inflectional system is represented via a set of exemplary paradigms. Novel wordforms are produced by analogy with previously encountered forms. This paper describes a recurrent neural network which can use this strategy to learn the paradigms of a morphologically complex language based on incomplete and randomized input. Results are given which show good performance for a range of typologically diverse languages.

Grapheme and syllable units have been shown to influence the dynamics of handwriting in adults and children, but the influence of morphemes remains to be clarified. We tested the ability of French-speaking adults and fourth and sixth grade children to process the morphological structure of words during writing. They were asked to copy three types of words on a digitizer: morphologically complex words, morphologically simple words matched for the bigram at the syllabic boundary, and morphologically simple words matched for the bigram at the morphemic boundary. Latencies were shorter for morphologically complex words than for simple words only in adults. Requiring individuals to process morphological structure increased the time taken to write the letter before a morphemic boundary in adults and sixth graders. In contrast, fourth graders wrote the letter before the syllabic boundary more quickly for complex words than for simple words. These results indicate that words are represented in a decomposed form in the lexicon, and that the morphological structure of words regulates the dynamics of handwriting.

Recent proposals in the semantics literature hold that the negative comparative less and negative adjectives like short in English are morphosyntactically complex, unlike their positive counterparts more and tall. For instance, the negative adjective short might decompose into little tall (Rullmann, Dissertation, 1995; Heim, Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory, vol. 16, 2006, Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung, vol. 12, 2008; Büring, Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory, vol. 17, 2007). Positing a silent little as part of adjectives like short correctly predicts that they are semantically opposite to tall; we seek evidence for this decomposition in language understanding in English and Polish. Our visual verification tasks compare processing of positive and negative comparatives with taller and shorter against that of less symbolically-rich mathematical statements, $$A > B$$ , $$B < A$$ . We find that both language and math statements generally lead to monotonic increases in processing load along with the number of negative symbols (as predicted for language by e.g. Clark and Chase, Cognitive Psychology, 3:472–517, 1972). Our study is the first to examine the processing of the gradable predicates tall and short cross-linguistically, as well as in contrast to extensionally-equivalent, and putatively non-linguistic stimuli (cf. Deschamps et al, Cognition, 143:115–128, 2015 with quantificational determiners).

In research on grammatical gender, assignment and agreement are the two central notions. Genders are defined as systems of agreement classes, and the assignment of nouns to genders is reflected in the agreement they consistently trigger on associated elements. Yet, gender assignment and gender agreement are often discussed quite separately. This paper investigates the possibility that gender agreement is not only an overt manifestation of gender assignment, but that properties of agreement systems can themselves constrain the assignment systems they express. The paper discusses typological and diachronic evidence for the fact that not every type of assignment system can be expressed in every type of agreement system.

This article investigated the effects of twospecific Hebrew nominal word structures andword length, on the latency and accuracy ofgrade school children's reading ofwords. For this study, three-, four- and five-letterwords of the feminine nominalderivative structure and the feminine nominalinflectional structure, at three differentgrade levels, were used. The study alsodifferentiated between an additional vocalizedconsonant and the addition of a vowel letter.The participants, 150 native monolingual Hebrewspeakers in grades two, four and six, wereasked to read vocalized nouns. The paperreports and analyzes the differences in thereading of the two morphological structures andword lengths to draw conclusions about theireffects on reading performance. The resultsindicated that inflections took longer to readand elicited more correct responses thanderivations. For derivations with theprogression of grade level, latency becomesshorter and the number of correct responsesincreases. For inflections with the progressionof grade level, latency becomes longer but thenumber of correct responses increases. With theaddition of a consonant at all grade levels,latency becomes longer. For accuracy, therewere differential results for the differentword lengths in the different grades. With theaddition of a vowel letter, accuracy increasedin all the grade levels. Latency, for the twoword lengths, showed differential results inthe different grades. A hypothesis on readingdevelopment is suggested based on the language-specificcharacteristics of Hebrew morphologyand the double vowel system of Hebrew.

Many new words middle school children encounter in books they read are relatively transparent derived forms whose meanings might be figured out through analysis of the word parts. Of importance is whether students can not only read and recognize the structure of morphologically complex words but also determine their meanings. This issue was addressed by investigating the relationship of third and fifth graders' awareness of the structure and meanings of derived words and the relationship of these forms of morphological awareness to word reading and reading comprehension. The results showed that awareness of structure was significantly related to the ability to define morphologically complex words; some aspects were also significantly related to the reading of derived words. The three morphology tasks accounted for significant variance in reading comprehension at both grade levels, but the contribution was stronger for the fifth than the third grade. It may be educationally noteworthy that morphological analysis contributed significantly to reading comprehension for the third graders because they are presumably just beginning to learn to read and understand morphologically complex words.

We discuss here the potential use of a morphologically aware spelling corrector to aid second language learners in finding words in an electronic dictionary, using Korean as the language of instantiation but with a method extensible to many languages. The tool discussed is a composition of two parts: a spelling corrector and morphological analyzer. When these two parts are composed, it allows for the spelling correction of morphologically complex words. The results include correct spellings as well as one or more possible morphological parses, which can aid the student both in their spelling and in their understanding of the components of the words. It can be particularly useful when students hear a word (rather than constructing it themselves) and may, therefore, not know the correct spelling or all the morphemes in it. The performance of this method is tested with data obtained from a Korean student learner error corpus and then compared with that of another publicly available morphologically aware spellchecker—the online Pusan National University spelling and grammar checker. Testing and findings reveal that traditional spellcheckers will not find many student errors, because they are not designed to; the word they typed is a correct word, but the incorrect one for the context. Providing students with multiple search results at all times allows them to choose the correct one for their context, and doing so allowed our tool to offer spelling correction, where a more traditional spellchecker did not.