The present study investigates whether two types of word combinations (free combinations and collocations) differ in terms of processing by testing Howarth's Continuum Model based on word combination typologies from a phraseological tradition. A visual semantic judgment task was administered to advanced Swedish learners of English (n = 27) and…

The present study investigates the use of English verb-noun collocations in the writing of native speakers of Hebrew at three proficiency levels. For this purpose, we compiled a learner corpus that consists of about 300,000 words of argumentative and descriptive essays. For comparison purposes, we selected LOCNESS, a corpus of young adult native…

We examined negative transfer from English and Spanish to Portuguese pronunciation. Participants were native English speakers, some of whom spoke Spanish. Participants completed a computer-based Portuguese pronunciation tutorial and then pronounced trained letter-to-sound correspondences in unfamiliar Portuguese words; some shared orthographic…

Presents the results of an investigation into how native speakers of English provide corrective feedback to errors in conversation with their nonnative speaker friends. Native speakers responded to errors by using either on-record or off-record corrective feedback and several noncorrective discourse devices to repair conversational difficulties.…

Examination of native Chinese Mandarin speakers' identification of monosyllables that included oral and nasal stops representing English/Mandarin contrasts and noncontrasts in syllable-initial/-final positions found that the presence of nasal as opposed to oral stop consonants in the syllables appeared to be the most significant factor affecting…

Native English speakers' and foreign students' perceptions of 14 English intonation signals, recorded free of verbal context, show foreign students may be misinterpreting or missing much information communicated with nonlexical signals. (Author/MSE)

Expands on the authors' (1995) investigation of the parsing performance on "wh"-movement sentences by Chinese-speaking learners of English. The article compares the difficulty second-language learners have in parsing subject "wh"-traces in embedded finite and nonfinite clauses with the problems they have in parsing Garden Path…

An error analysis based on phonetic transcription of French utterances by native speakers of Cantonese yielded a scale of difficulty for word-initial and word-final consonants. The Markedness Differential Hypothesis explained some errors. Evidence also pointed to interaction of language acquisition with markedness reversals. (35 references) (CNP)

The study reported on in this article set out to replicate and extend Bardovi-Harlig and Dornyei's (1998) investigation of pragmatic awareness by addressing two research questions: (a) Do learners in English as a foreign language (EFL) and English as a second language (ESL) contexts display differences in their recognition and rating of pragmatic…

Investigated the effects of various types of negotiation on learners' output. The study focused on three groups of child learners of Dutch who were asked to orally describe a series of pictures to a partner in a communicative context. Results indicated how and to what extent participants interactionally modified their output. (Author/CK) (59…