This study compared negative and positive evidence in adult word learning, predicting that adults would learn more forms following negative evidence. Ninety-two native English speakers (32 men and 60 women [M[subscript age] = 20.38 years, SD = 2.80]), learned nonsense nouns and verbs provided within English frames. Later, participants produced…

Learning inflectional morphology is a vexing problem for second language (L2) learners. Children acquiring their native language also experience some difficulty, which results in their committing overgeneralization errors. Long after individuals have achieved a high level of proficiency in the L2, they are still plagued by uncertainty when it…

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…

This study examined the development of integrated knowledge or automatic competence in adult SLA. Automatic competence was operationalized in terms of the participants' sensitivity to grammatical errors in a self-paced reading task. Their sensitivity was determined by observing whether there was a delay in reading ungrammatical sentences. Native…

Answers to theoretical questions about the place of input in a formal second language acquisition model are dependent on a distinction between two kinds of learner hypotheses. Type-N hypotheses require "negative evidence" for testing, while Type-P hypotheses are tested on the basis of "positive data" alone. (Author/CB)

Describes a study of "analogy" and "interference" errors in the syntax of second language learners. (Author/RM)

Discusses the theory that the second-language processing of subordinate clauses and of anaphora is affected by the basic word order of a learners native language. This phenomenon, believed to be a prediction of universal grammar, is explored. (54 references) (Author/VWL)

This study examined word identification skills among Chinese and Korean college students learning to read English as a second language in a naming experiment and an auditory category judgment task. Both groups demonstrated faster and more accurate naming performance on high-frequency words than low-frequency words and on regular words than…

Contrastive analysis a priori predicts facts of possible errors in learning a second language that contrastive analysis a posteriori cannot explain. In a study of relative clause formation, the latter approach shows that students have no trouble, whereas the former approach shows the task to be so difficult that they avoid it. (AG)

Report of a study which examined the English proficiency of 22 Arabic-speaking students enrolled in a low intermediate intensive English course at the American University of Beirut. (Author)

This study of the speech of a five-year-old Japanese girl learning English focused on the use of prefabricated routines where items are memorized as wholes. The forms of the copula, "do you" questions and embedded "how to" questions were examined. (AG)

An analysis of speech samples collected from adult ESL students revealed recurring variants indicating that learners attempt to simplify the target language in several ways. A universal process of simplification in language learning is postulated to account for the recurrence of the same variants in different learner idiolects. (Author/KM)

Revised and abridged version of You Can't Learn without Goofing (An Analysis of Children's Second Language Errors')'' to appear in Jack Richards (ed.), Error Analysis -- Perspectives in Second Language Acquisition,'' (Longmans). A goof'' is a productive error made during the language learning process. (RS)

Presents a study of the relationships among error types, feedback types, and immediate learner repair in four French immersion classrooms at the elementary level. The database is drawn from transcripts of audiotape recordings of 13 French language-arts lessons and 14 subject-matter lessons totaling 18.3 hours and including 921 error sequences.…

Results of a diagnostic test revealed that Thai students have no more trouble in learning English prepositions than others learning English as a second language; all the groups had difficulty. Error analysis was found to be just as effective in explaining mistakes as contrastive analysis. (AG)