A collection of 32 conference papers is presented as reflecting the state of the art in contrastive linguistics studies of English and other languages. The reports cover the following topics: 5 English contrastive projects (Romanian-English, Yugoslav-Serbo-Croatian English, English-Hungarian, and Finnish-English analysis, and a project from the…

A study investigated errors in the writing of black students to determine how those errors were influenced by black oral English. Writing samples were gathered from 99 third grade and 68 sixth grade students in a school in an inner city, low income neighborhood. All errors in the samples were listed and analyzed. In the samples produced by the…

Intended for students, teachers, parents, and administrators in charge of educating bilingual children, the monograph provides a summarized account of the information available regarding theories and research in second language acquisition, divided into four chapters. Chapter I is an historical overview of language acquisition theories,…

A project designed to gather information about similarities and differences that may be important for teaching English to Finnish learners, and, to a certain extent, for teaching Finnish through English, was conducted through a systematic comparison of the two languages and an analysis of instances where the two languages come into contact. In the…

Research indicates that first (L1) and second language (L2) acquisition involve some of the same processes, yet L2 learners apparently acquire the structures of the target language in a systematic way by passing through a sequence of developmental stages. This study shows that in the earliest stages of syntactic development the L2 learner's…

The development of production and comprehension by one two-year-old girl of three Japanese constructions (passives, causatives, and "te moraw"), which have similar surface configurations "NP ga NP ni V ("rare"/ "sase"/ "te moraw") TENSE," is investigated through elicited imitations and responses to the investigator's questions about the content of…

Reports an experimental investigation of the influence of linguistic factors on linguistic performance. The factors studied were interpretive complexity and surface length. Results show an interaction between types of linguistic complexity and type of linguistic performance. (Author/SED)

The role of sensory attributes in a vocabulary learning task was investigated for a non-oral language using deaf and hearing individuals, more or less skilled in the use of sign language. Skilled signers encoded invented signs in terms of linguistic structure rather than as visual-pictorial events. (Author/RD)

Discusses the results of an error analysis of 100 English compositions written by university students in Iran. It is suggested that mistakes are not primarily due to interference from the native language, but to developmental errors, similar to errors made in first language acquisition. (Author/AMH)

Discusses the literature on interference as the cause of errors in second language speech. A study is reported which shows that interference by the native language is most often the factor responsible for the largest number of mistakes in grammar and vocabulary. (Author/AMH)

A study is described which (1) focuses on the syllable structure of the interlanguage in an attempt to determine how it differs from the syllable structure of the target language, and which (2) begins to identify some of the processes which may shape that interlanguage syllable structure. (Author)

Studies are reported which attempt to discover the exact level of second language proficiency reached by students in second language immersion programs, with emphasis on analysis of error. (RM)

Discusses the measurability of linguistic and communicative competence in light of the performance/competence dichotomy, and proposes a method for measuring loss of communicative competence using spontaneous speech data. (11 references) (Author/CK)

Discusses two experiments investigating non-antecedent suppression in American Sign Language (ASL). Findings indicate that spoken and signed languages use the same processing mechanisms in resolving co-reference relations. Results also indicate that within the probe recognition paradigm, the spatial indexing of ASL pronouns is similar to gender…

A model for assessing communicative ability is presented that is prompted by the fact that most error analysts in the past concentrated on morphemic and syntactic levels. It is suggested that emphasis must shift from acquisition of linguistic competence per se to communicative competence. (23 references) (LB)