This article reports major findings of a longitudinal, naturalistic study of the acquisition of English as a second language by a five-year-old Japanese girl. The emphasis is on empirical findings rather than on any particular theoretical orientation. (Author/POP)

This paper is based on a classroom experience that showed the need of teaching American culture before attempting to teach American literature meaningfully to foreigners. The students in this learning situation were the Middle-Eastern employees of an American organization in the school year 1966-67. The teachers found out the students interpreted…

Presents the results of an experiment which examined the temporal characteristics of voiceless plosives in American English, Arabic, and Arabic-accented English. Results showed that Arabic-accented English departed from the target language goal and constituted an articulation type characterizable as more Arabic than Arabic itself. (Author/SED)

Presents results of two case studies involving the acquisition of English in a natural environment, as well as the results of two judgment tests in which subjects were asked to judge the grammaticality of sentences containing both correctly and incorrectly used dative verbs. (SL)

A study of English speakers' acquisition of relative clauses in Chinese, Japanese, Persian, German, and Portugese is reported. Various structures were tested to separate interlanguage features attributable to first language interference from those universal to second language acquisition. Application of an accessibility hierarchy theory and…

A test administered to 73 adults learning English as a second language revealed a highly consistent order of relative difficulty in the use of eight functors across different language backgrounds. This study also confirmed earlier results indicating that children and adults use common strategies and process linguistic data similarly. (Author/KM)

Discusses the design and interpretation of instrumental phonetic studies of second language (L2) speech production. The speech of L2 learners is evaluated to determine to what extent it diverges from the differing phonetic norms of L1, which are estimated from the speech of a small number of native speakers. (Author/LMO)

This article reports on an introspective study that examined the relationship between first language L1; Farsi lexicalization of the concepts represented by the second language L2; English target words and learners' inferencing behavior while reading English texts. Participants were 20 Farsi-speaking university students of English as a foreign…

A review of research about second language learning indicates that nonprimary acquisition is sensitive to the center-periphery distinction. There is clear evidence that this construct has reflexes in interlanguage word order with respect to the probability of native word order influence, difficulty, and order of emergence. (CB)

Data on Dutch-Turkish language-mixing behavior of Turkish children growing up in The Netherlands are presented and analyzed. While functional characteristics of the children's language-mixing were compatible with models from earlier research, structural analysis suggests no universality of surface structure constraint rules for sentence-internal…

Examines the word-final, voiceless, stop-sibilant clusters formed by the attachment of -z morphemes to verbs and nouns in the speech production of Japanese learners of English. Reduction is the favored production strategy, but epenthesis is also used. Noun attachments are subject to less error than are verb attachments. (Author/LMO)

Reports on an eight month study examining the development of turn-allocation devices in children acquiring English as a second language. The role of prior language experience in second language learning is explored. (Author/AM)

The parameter-setting model of universal grammar provides a basis for integrating two theories of second language acquisition: contrastive analysis and creative construction. The elicited responses of adult native speakers of Spanish and adult native speakers of Japanese were examined. The head-initial/head-final parameter was the principle…