Three profoundly deaf individuals undertook a low-frequency backward lexical translation task (French/English), where morphological structure was manipulated and orthographic distance between test items was measured. Conditions included monomorphemic items (simplex), polymorphemic items (complex), items whose French morphological structure…

In this article, we report the results of a self-paced reading experiment designed to investigate the question of whether or not advanced French and German learners of English as a second language (L2) are sensitive to tense/aspect mismatches between a fronted temporal adverbial and the inflected verb that follows (e.g. *"Last week, James has…

The article discusses the potential of combining learner corpus research with experimental studies in order to fine-tune the understanding of learner language development. It illustrates the complementarity of the two methodological approaches with data from an ongoing study of the acquisition of the English tense and aspect system by French…

Language interference is one of the factors that affect language learning by many learners of second and third languages. In Zambia, the impact of language interference on the learners of French requires closer attention. Our literature review shows that few studies have looked at the impact of interference from Zambian languages on the learners…

Most research on language awareness in a second language (L2) has been carried out with adult learners. This research presents data showing that pedagogical techniques can be devised enabling children as young as 8 to develop metalinguistic awareness of their emerging L2 system. Building on existing work by Canadian researchers, this…

Reports on a study which sought to compare syntax acquisition in French by francophone and non-francophone children, in order to establish the order in which French grammatical elements are acquired, and in order to create a French version of the Bilingual Syntax Measure. (AM)

Reports on research into the validity of the theory of interlanguage, based on evidence of interference of the native language in Dutch students of French. (AM)

Describes an investigation of the differences and similarities existing between the intonation systems of French and English. The unity of the procedures described here is confirmed by an analysis of intonational errors made by English-speaking learners of French. (Author/VWL)

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…

A discussion of language data suggesting that young bilinguals and monolinguals exhibit a similar sequence of acquisition of standard use of English prepositions and French auxiliaries. Two error analysis studies are summarized, results of them are applied to the Franco-Ontarian and Quebec sociolinguistic contexts, and implications are discussed.…

Reports on a study investigating the occurrence of spelling errors in the French dictations of French-speaking Ontarians. The frequency of errors was compared to that of French speakers from Quebec. Results indicate that spelling interference from English is present for French-speaking Ontarians in far greater degree than from French speakers from…

Examines the differential use of formal explicit knowledge and intuitive implicit knowledge in a second language grammaticality judgement tasks. (Author/AM)

Presents results of a study that sought to test the pronunciation problems of a large number of American students in a beginning college-level French course. Learner difficulties over a 15-week period were used to create a hierarchy of minimal contrasts representing major, secondary, and minor problems for the students in learning French sounds.…

An error analysis based on phonetic transcription of French utterances by native speakers of Cantonese yielded a scale of difficulty for word-initial and word-final consonants. The Markedness Differential Hypothesis explained some errors. Evidence also pointed to interaction of language acquisition with markedness reversals. (35 references) (CNP)

The purpose of this study was to describe the pronunication of American college students learning French. To gather the data a set of 21 sounds, all theoretically in contrast with English sounds, was chosen. These were elicited in a series of sessions during the subjects' first semester of French. The subjects recorded their pronunciation on…