Studied children with word finding difficulties who were identified through a wider survey of educational provision for those with language and communication difficulties. (Author/VWL)

Describes a study of how the verb-form variables of tense, aspect, mode, person, number, and stem and suffix irregularities interact for lower-level students of Spanish to determine if performance can be improved by asking students to monitor an individual variable when many of such variables must be integrated in a particular exercise. (SED)

Describes an experiment designed to determine which language errors interfere to the greatest degree with comprehension by native speakers of the language. For this purpose, an instructor prepared a list of most serious Spanish language errors which was submitted to native speakers for evaluation in terms of comprehension and acceptability. (MES)

Describes a research project using cloze procedure to measure language proficiency. Discusses test construction and various approaches to test scoring, concluding that results suggest a need for further examination of the random cloze format and acceptable scoring as a means to determine student proficiency in German. (MES)

Tested comprehension of syntactic structures by presenting each structure with both plausible and implausible content. Results revealed that cognitive nonlinguistic factors were important for comprehension and that errors and reaction time increased with age. The minimal contribution of neuropsychological factors to this decline suggests that the…

Examined how object shape, taxonomic relatedness, and prior lexical knowledge influenced children's overextensions (e.g., referring to pomegranates as apples). Researchers presented items that disentangled the three factors and used a novel comprehension task where children could indicate negative exemplars. Error patterns differed by task and by…

Describes a study undertaken to assess interference from two languages for learners of French. Suggests that susceptibility to interference is related to a number of factors, such as level of proficiency in the target language, and the degree and type of similarity between the target and the base language. (MES)

Describes a study designed to examine native speakers' reactions to errors contained in compositions written by advanced Spanish students, as a measure of error seriousness and a guide for selective correction. Suggests that errors interfering with comprehension should be eliminated first, followed by those that elicit negative reactions from…

The results from three studies using data provided by the SLOPE Test and oral interviews are reported. The studies include: (1) a comparison of rank orders obtained over a period of time; (2) a comparison of rank orders obtained in instrument-elicited and spontaneous speech; and (3) a comparison of results obtained using two methods of analysis,…

This paper presents and illustrates a technique for analyzing the communicative effect of errors produced in spoken and written communication samples by students of English as a second language (ESL). First, a method is demonstrated for eliciting a representative communication sample of a student's speech or writing, using pictorial stimuli.…

An experiment was carried out to investigate errors in translation exercises done by French students studying English as a second language. A code was devised to rate errors as being: (1) lexical or grammatical, and (2) related to the signifier or the signified, with further subdivisions within these groups. While this method has the advantage…

Presents one solution to the problem of eliciting, classifying, and measuring language learning errors in a longitudinal study, and, in addition, seeks to isloate particular difficulties of adult Iranian learners of English. (AM)

Examines lexical interference from the perspective of language proficiency in a study of Iranian English-as-a-Foreign-Language learners. Subjects were given two tests--a proficiency test and a test on similar lexical forms--to investigate whether there is any relationship between the two variables in question. Results indicate that there is a…

This study is a partial replication of a set of studies conducted to investigate the effects of unequal status on speech variation. It was found that, in some respects, first- and second-language variation may be quantitatively different. (52 references) (JL)

Explores the role of sonority in constraining the word identification errors of normal listeners by examining the phonological relationships between response errors and stimulus targets. Findings indicate that sonority and lexical phonostatistics may constrain coda-driven word-search processes. (35 references) (Author/CK)