This article presents the methodology used in a population-based study of early communicative development in Norwegian children using an adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates communicative development inventories (CDI), comprising approximately 6500 children aged between 0.8 and 3.0. To our knowledge, this is the first CDI study collecting data via the Internet. After a short description of the procedures used in adapting the CDI to Norwegian and the selection of participants, we discuss the advantages and potential pitfalls of using web-based forms as a method of data collection. We found that use of web-based forms was far less time-consuming, and therefore also far less expensive than the traditional paper-based forms. The risk of coding errors was virtually eliminated with this method. We conclude that in a society with high access to the Internet, this is a method well worth pursuing.

In this article, we discuss the ei litta construction in Norwegian, a construction that involves the use of feminine morphology combined with non-feminine nouns, and expresses evaluation. Through corpus analyses and an online survey, we investigate the form and function of the construction, synchronically and diachronically. We discuss the emergence of the ei litta construction in the light of a larger restructuring of the Norwegian gender system, possibly allowing for greater flexibility in the assignment of gender. We also describe the ei litta construction as an example of gender shift, a previously unattested morphological strategy in Norwegian to express evaluative meaning.

Compounds are words that are made up of at least two other words (lexemes), featuring lexical and syntactic characteristics and thus particularly interesting for the study of language processing. Most studies of compounds and language processing have been based on data from experimental single word production and comprehension tasks. To enhance the ecological validity of morphological processing research, data from other contexts, such as discourse production, need to be considered. This study investigates the production of nominal compounds in semi-spontaneous spoken texts by a group of speakers with fluent types of aphasia compared to a group of neurologically healthy speakers. The speakers with aphasia produce significantly fewer nominal compound types in their texts than the non-aphasic speakers, and the compounds they produce exhibit fewer different types of semantic relations than the compounds produced by the non-aphasic speakers. The results are discussed in relation to theories of language processing.

I denne artikkelen undersøker vi åssen et utvalg norsklærere fra barnetrinnet til videregående skole rapporterer at de praktiserer grammatikkundervisning. Datamaterialet er refleksjons-tekster skrevet av lærere som tok videreutdanning i norsk ved to forskjellige høyere utdanningsinstitusjoner. Vi stiller to forskningsspørsmål: Hvilke deler av grammatikken rapporterer lærerne at de underviser i, og hvilke arbeidsmåter rapporterer de at de bruker? Funnene viser at ordklasser tar mye plass i grammatikkundervisninga, både på barne- og ungdomstrinnet, mens syntaks får større plass hos VGS-lærerne. På barnetrinnet er bevegelse og spill den mest brukte arbeidsmåten, mens det sammenlignende perspektivet gis noe større plass på ungdomstrinnet og særlig på VGS. Det ser ut til å være en viss mangel på progresjon mellom barnetrinnet og ungdomstrinnet. Vi mener at funnene våre viser at en bør etterstrebe å gi studentene et mer deskriptivt syn på grammatikk, slik at de kan oppdage at grammatikken er noe man kan samtale om og utforske.