We develop the view that inflection is driven partly by non-phonological analogy and that non-phonological information is of particular importance to the inflection of non-canonical roots, which in the view of [Marcus, G. F., Brinkmann, U., Clahsen, H., Wiese, R., & Pinker, S. (1995). "German inflection: the exception that proves the rule."…

This paper discusses the validity and utility of contrastive analysis for language teaching, focusing on the utility of contrastive analysis over error analysis in analyzing adverbial positioning in sentences produced by two groups of native speakers of English and Arabic. Contains 13 references. (MDM)

Argues that the most important constraints on any proposed sound change are naturalness and minimality. Examples from Western Romance languages are provided to show how these principles can be applied to the best advantage, and a new solution is proposed to the problem of /erk/ from *DW in Armenian. (27 references) (Author/JL)

Shows that incorporation of units for syllable CV structures in a connectionist model of phonological encoding enables explanation of empirical patterns of speech errors. The model accounts for the finding of a bias toward additions of segments. Corpus analysis in Dutch and Spanish showed an addition bias in both languages. Showed that in…

Reviews the existing record pertaining to the acquisition of negation in Korean and juxtaposing it with current research in cross-linguistic child language acquisition. (Author/VWL)

A study of the acquisition of rules for the placement of the negative particle and some adverbs in Swedish generally supported the results of earlier studies on favorable contexts for the correct application of the placement rules, but also revealed that some errors may result from tendencies to emphasize semantics over syntax. (Author/CB)

Investigation of the acquisition of Tamil verb inflections in three two-year-old children revealed a high percentage of usage of verb inflections indicating tense, aspect, modality, person, number, and gender. Explanations for this early, almost error-free language acquisition are explored in terms of the facilitating properties of agglutinating…

Error analysis of the informal conversations (in both the interlanguage [IL] and native language) of two native Vietnamese speakers gave limited support to the hypothesis that a universal preference for the open syllable is a shaping force in IL phonology that is independent of the process of native language transfer. (Author/CB)

Discusses phonological errors and their causes in the language performance of beginning to advanced Slovak grammar school students learning English as a foreign language under conditions suggested by G. Nickel (1989). Errors in perception, production, and perception/production are shown to be of different quality and distribution; interferential…

Addresses issue of quality of spoken Welsh of children in Welsh-medium schools. Analysis of morphology of inflected pronouns produced by these children suggests that subset of apparent errors may represent stage in process of remolding traditional examples to produce elements of code that is unique to these new speakers of Welsh and that may…

Discusses a study of concord phenomena in spoken Brazilian Portuguese. Findings indicate the presence of disfluencies, including apparent corrections, in about 15% of the relevant tokens in the corpus of recorded speech data. It is concluded that speech is not overly laden with errors, and there is nothing in the data to mislead the language…

The extent to which the second-language English spelling of young Welsh-English bilinguals is systematically idiosyncratic was examined from free compositions written by 10- to 11-year-old children. A model is presented of the second-language spelling process in the form of a "decision tree." (Contains 29 references.) (Author/LB)

Longitudinal observation of one- to three-year-olds' (N=2) acquisition of complement phrasal construction in Korean found that, in spite of typological differences between English and Korean, both syntactic and semantic characteristics were shared by children acquiring complement structure in the two languages. (Author/CB)

Comparison of Chinese, Malay, and Tamil primary school students' responses to a test featuring 19 error types related to English verb structure revealed no significant differences between the three groups' selection of developmental errors. The test also showed promise in measuring students' English accuracy as opposed to fluency. (CB)

Examination of the lexical proficiency of 24 near-native and 12 native senior high school speakers of Swedish found no consistent differences between the groups on measures of lexical density, lexical variation, and lexical sophistication. However, clear differences were seen in frequency of errors and in the distribution of error types. (CB)