ALICE, a multimedia framework for intelligent computer-assisted language instruction (ICALI) at Carnegie Mellon University (PA), consists of a set of tools for building a number of different types of ICALI programs in any language. Its Natural Language Processing tools for syntactic error detection, morphological analysis, and generation of…

Twenty-five advanced Chinese learners of English as a Second Language (ESL) provided grammaticality judents in full-sentence and word-by-word conditions. The results indicated that parsing, and not grammatical competence, is the source of difficulty on performance with subject extraction sentences. Contains 58 references. (MDM)

Examines the development of children's understanding of the difference between "want" and "need" in two different experiments. The first experiment required the children to respond verbally in choosing between the two concepts; the second required them to give an object to one of two characters who had made a request using…

Two processes, serial and hierarchical, are generally opposed to account for grammatical encoding in language production. In a developmental perspective, the question addressed here is whether the subject-verb agreement during writing is computed serially, once the words are linearly ordered in the sentence, or hierarchically, as soon as the…

An experiment combining listening comprehension training and error analysis was conducted with students at the English Language Institute, Queens College, the City University of New York. The purpose of the study was to investigate how to take learners who were primarily dependent on perceptive skills for comprehension and widen their…

A study is presented which investigated ways Spanish speaking preschool children learn to identify letters of the alphabet, the types of errors made in identifying letters, and whether there is a developmental learning sequence in alphabet learning for Spanish speakers. The question of the influence of socioeconomic level on performance was also…

As part of a series of studies dealing with varieties of interference in sentence learning as assessed by multiple choice tests, a study was undertaken to explore the effects of pictures on inferentially produced interference in recognition memory for sentence information. The subjects were 104 first grade students and 104 fourth, fifth, and sixth…

The results from three studies using data provided by the SLOPE Test and oral interviews are reported. The studies include: (1) a comparison of rank orders obtained over a period of time; (2) a comparison of rank orders obtained in instrument-elicited and spontaneous speech; and (3) a comparison of results obtained using two methods of analysis,…

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…

Children's spelling errors were examined to determine the relationships between linguistic cues used (phonetic, graphemic, and morphophonemic), grade level, reading proficiency, and spelling proficiency. The standardized reading and spelling test scores of 180 second, third, and fourth grade students were used to randomly select 22 good…

Discusses the theoretical basis, implementation, and pedagogical considerations of CALLE (Computer-Aided Language Learning Environment), a dialogue-based beginning Spanish language instruction system. CALLE uses Lexical Functional Grammar Theory to analyze errors in student input. Sample screen is shown. (Author/LMO)

This discussion of courseware design for computer-assisted language learning in English as a second language (ESL) highlights the role of randomization and creativity. A set of programs is described which are based on error analysis of students in the ESL program at Baruch College and developed around grammatical terms. (Author/LRW)

Reviews language attrition research as well as analyzes characteristics of acquisition and attrition of first- and second-language skills. The relationship between language and memory is also discussed. Research results are summarized in appendix. (Author/LMO)

Adult females recalled lists of six words, including some plural nouns, presented visually in sequence. A frequent error was to detach the plural from its root. This supports a morpheme-based as opposed to a unitary word code. Evidence for a primarily phonological coding of the plural morpheme was obtained. (Author/RD)

To investigate decision level processes involved in bilingual word recognition tasks, Dutch-English participants had to name Dutch-English homographs in English. In a stimulus list containing items from both languages, interlingual homographs yielded longer naming latencies, more Dutch responses, and more other errors in both response languages if…