This study offers an analysis of bilingual acquisition with particular emphasis on conditions that required the child to use negative syntactic structures. English monolinguals scored differently than bilinguals in English. There also was evidence that Spanish negative constructions were used in English negative constructions. (Author/BW)

Presents three interrelated theses on the mechanisms underlying developmental and transfer errors, and exemplifies these with reference to a number of English L2 developmental structures. Proposes a framework where linguistic factors play a major role in protracting the restructuring of the preverbal negation rule by Spanish learners. (Author/MES)

In a previous paper, J. Hurford accounts for errors in children's question forms by postulating that children incorrectly internalize adult rules. This article suggests that this rule is inconsistent and unjestified, and that such errors are due to segmentation problems and processing limitations. (CHK)

Examines different approaches to prosodic acquisition: Gerken's S(W) production template; Fikkert's and Archibald's theories of stress acquisition and Demuth and Fee's prosodic hierarchy account. Results reveal that current approaches cannot account for findings in the data such as the increased preservation of final over nonfinal unstressed…

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 learning theory is described that addresses the learning of lexical entries for certain predicational terms. The functioning of the theory is exemplified through a discussion of the learning schema, with particular attention to varying lexicalization patterns. (Contains 56 references.) (Author/LB)

Most analyses of linguistic errors set up unidimensional categories of grammatical, lexical, and semantic deviations. A two-dimensional classification system is described that formed the basis of a study of phenomena of foreign-language interaction. Thirteen classes of linguistic deviation emerged in the study. (Contains 37 references.) (Author/LB)

It has been known for several decades that young children have difficulties with universal sentences. In this article, I present an analysis of the main errors that have been reported in the literature. My proposal is based on an old idea, namely, that children's errors are caused by a noncanonical mapping from syntactic form to semantic…

Children, ages 5 to 8 years (n=71), were required to listen and detect errors out of a partly wrong sequence of tape-recorded French number words from 1 to 100. Children (from several schools near Montpellier, France) were from preschool, grade 1, and grade 2. Results show that wrong syntactic rules were better detected than omissions, whereas…

Productive errors in the Spanish of 3 Spanish-speaking children and 115 adults learning Spanish as a second language are analyzed. The errors are organized into three categories--lexical, morphological, and syntactic--and each category is further divided according to the type of cognitive error-processing strategy shown: simplification, reduction…

Supports and expands upon S. P. Corder's theory that all the utterances of a language learner are well-formed and appropriate. (PMP)

Vocabulary test errors made by people with varying levels of vocabulary knowledge might give information about the stages involved in learning a word's meaning. A study used such data to evaluate Johnson O'Connor's proposal that word learning involves four stages and that each stage is characterized by a type of confusion (a mislead). In the first…

The use of error analysis in second language instruction is discussed. Error analysis is seen as an effective aid to second language remedial teaching if errors are treated as evidence of learners' strategies, and analyzed in terms of their significance. A rule-oriented analysis explains why errors are made and implies what ought to be done to…

Pronunciation of words with a fricative content was elicited over a seven-month period from seven English-speaking children ranging in age from 1;5 to 2;3. The recorded speech was analyzed for correct fricative production and substitutions. Results indicate that: (1) overall percentage of correct production is slightly higher in final position…