Presents study in which attempts by children to learn a number of new words revealed that their recall errors were similar to phonological deformations found in speech of young children in early stages of language development. Suggests role of memory needs to be taken into consideration. (Author/BK)

Kean (EJ 165 107) presented a linguistic model to account for the features of the syndrome of Broca's aphasia, especially their agrammatism. This paper critiques Kean's paper by describing and evaluating her five major arguments. It is concluded that Kean's phonological model cannot account for agrammatism as well as syntactic models can.…

Applies markedness theory to the area of error evaluation by native speakers' reactions to non-native speakers errors. The number of errors involving marked and unmarked pairs of forms and structures is tested. Errors reflecting the unmarked-to-marked direction (1st person/3rd person singular, for example) caused greater irritation in native…

Describes two experiments in which subjects read aloud pairs of nonsense syllables rapidly presented on a display screen or repeated the same syllables presented auditorily. Results support an explanation of the speech error generation process in which a segment's strength is a function of its frequency of occurrence in English. (SED)

Recent years have seen the decline in popularity of contrastive analysis (CA) and the rise of error analysis (EA) as a method for explaining and predicting errors in second language learning. In CA, it is felt that by comparing the structure of a first language (L1) to that of one being learned (L2), errors can be predicted. These errors are…

An examination of the effectiveness of EA, CA, and students' perception of difficulty in predicting and explaining language learning difficulties. (RM)

Error analysis has been presented as a means of "finding a shorter way" in the analysis of learners' difficulties in foreign languages. The alternative starts with a comparison of the native and foreign languages in order to predict such difficulties. The two types are complementary rather than mutually exclusive. (Author/MSE)

The teacher of English to non-native speakers needs information not available in a descriptive English grammar. This article examines the teacher's grammatical needs with reference to article usage in English and proposes an outline of one section of such a teaching grammar. Items discussed are "a,""the,""-s" and "some." (CHK)

The reversal errors in the printing of 51 first grade students were examined. These children were asked to print a series of reversible target figures (letters and numbers, such as 2-s, p-q, p-9, and b-d) that were presented alone and with their mirror-image counterparts. To control for the possibility that the mere presence of another figure…

Investigates the inconsistencies of personal pronoun production both in production and between production and comprehension in a pronoun-reversing child. (EKN)

Analyzed some factors affecting acquisition of subjunctive by upper level students of Spanish. Variables included were 1) length of foreign residence; 2) total amount of formal study; and 3) pretest and posttest scores. A week-long lesson on the uses of subjunctive intervened between the tests. Tests are appended. (LMO)

Investigated whether the rate and patterns of pronoun case error were influenced by the composition of an individual pronoun's paradigm. Twenty-nine children ages 2;6 to 4;0 years were audiotaped interacting with their primary caregivers in various settings. Results indicated that 27 children produced case errors. The composition of a pronoun's…

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 difficulties in perception of English /r/ and /l/ and concludes the error pattern is not predictable on the basis of contrastive phonological analysis but might be the result of acoustic-phonetic factors. (EKN)

The comprehension of sentences expressing instigative causation was investigated in children aged two to four speaking English, Italian, Serbo-Croatian, and Turkish. Cross-linguistic differences in development revealed the roles of morphological and syntactic devices in processing these constructions. The word order systems of English and Italian…