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…

This research investigates the usefulness of two major types of interactional feedback (elicitation and reformulation) in dyadic interaction. The focus is on the different ways in which each feedback type is provided and their relationship with learner repair. The participants were 42 adult intermediate English as a second language learners and…

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…

This analysis looks at the humorous use of second-speaker repeats to initiate conversational repair. It is proposed that consideration of joking repeats forces reanalysis of the organization of conversational repair. The preference analysis theory is rejected in favor of a locally governed analysis of conversational repair in which participants…

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…

This paper analyzes a typical school spelling task in terms of an information processing model of spelling performance. Based on principles embodied in a computer simulation program previously reported (SPEL by Simon and Simon) the model proposed here has been expanded to try to account for many more kinds of student error than were possible with…

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.…

Studies patterns of frequent mistakes in the use of articles in English by speakers of Hindi/Punjabi. The control over the definite and indefinite article is examined in relation to their forms and functions. The use of articles is also considered in complex noun phrases and different syntactic structures, and an attempt is made to establish a…

Describes a part of a study on children's acquisition of Warlpiri, an aboriginal language spoken in central Australia, which aimed to find out at what age the children respond consistently to particular word orders and case frames for simple transitive sentences. Makes comparisons with the acquisition of Turkish transitive clauses. (SED)

A phoneme confusion matrix consisting of 1,620 spontaneous speech errors was analyzed. It is shown that there is no tendency for linguistically unmarked consonants to replace marked consonants and that sound segment errors almost always involve the movement of unitary segments and not the movement of component distinctive features. (SW)

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…

Two experiments were conducted to explore processing of relative clause structures by normal elderly adults. Four groups of subjects (aged 20-29 years, 60-69 years, 70-79 years, and 80-89 years) participated in a lexical decision task and a sentence repetition task. (19 references) (VWL)

Describes the development and organization of the Colt (Communicative Orientation of Language Teaching) observation scheme and Lyster and Ranta's (1997) error treatment model, instruments including predetermined categories to describe features of instructional input and interaction in second language classrooms. Concludes that the choice of…

Investigated the time course of activation of the mental representations of word meanings in a series of three cross-modal priming experiments. The study interprets the data with respect to both localist and distributed implementations of the cohort model. Results indicate that if early competition among simultaneously activated meanings exists,…

Some of the areas in which second language acquisition (SLA) theories and research have contributed to language teaching are highlighted. It is noted that while results of SLA research may have contributed to understanding of language learning, insights from such research may have little direct effect on classroom instruction. One explanation is…