The present study investigates the use of English lexical collocations and their relation to the online writing of Taiwanese college English majors and non-English majors. Data for the study were collected from 41 English majors and 21 non-English majors at a national university of science and technology in southern Taiwan. Each student was asked…

A study examined the relative contributions of age, sex, and education to verbal and nonverbal fluency in a normal population. Sixty-seven subjects aged 12 to 71 years performed paper-and-pencil tasks proven to be dependent on the right and left hemispheric modalities of the frontal lobes. Multiple t-tests were applied to determine whether…

An emerging body of literature points to the prominent role of the frontal lobes in the retrieval of verbs, whereas production of common and proper nouns arguably is mediated primarily by posterior and anterior temporal regions, respectively. Although the majority of studies examining the neuroanatomic distinctions between verb and noun retrieval…

The problem of determining relative weights for quantity and quality in scoring foreign language speaking and writing fluency tests is studied. French speaking and writing fluency tests were administered to students of French in several schools in England. Data from these tests was analyzed to support the suggestion that scoring formulas should…

Activities which focus on form and communicative outcome are suggested for developing accuracy and fluency in second language students. Examples of such activities (with focus on the English as a second language learner) that vary the circumstances of communication in the classroom are presented. (Author/CB)

Examines the contribution of second-language proficiency and first-language reading ability in terms of the threshold hypothesis of language proficiency. (38 references) (Author/CK)

In this study of German as a foreign language, formal classroom experience is compared with informal use of German outside the classroom focusing on three syntactic features: main clause word order (subject-verb-object, or SVO), topicalization (subject-verb inversion), and subordinate word order (subject-object-verb, or SOV). T tests and…

This study compared the efficacy of measures of naming speed, verbal fluency and self-ratings for establishing language dominance in 25 bilingual English-Spanish adults with college degrees. Naming speed was measured by total naming times (in seconds) for five "Alzheimer's Quick Test" tasks (Wiig, Nielsen, Minthon & Warkentin, 2002)…

This study tested hypotheses on the relationship between achievement of proficiency in spoken Japanese and the variables of ease of adjustment to life in Japan; effects of childhood multilingualism, musical background, and previous level of formal education; and deliberately delaying the introduction of kanji (Chinese ideographs) into intensive…

A study of advanced English learners' use or avoidance of English idioms is described. The investigation looked at whether the subjects would attempt to use English idioms in a translation task containing idioms, or would instead use non-idiomatic synonyms or paraphrase. It also looked at which idioms are used and which are avoided: those that are…

A study of the process of bilingualization of second-generation immigrants to Catalonia, a region of Spain, is described and summarized. The study looks at the interrelationships between (1) linguistic context, all sources of messages in natural speech; (2) linguistic behavior, the real communicative use the individual makes of his expressive…