This study examines the production of regular and irregular participle forms of German with high and low frequencies using a speeded production task. 40 children in two age groups (five- to seven-year olds, eleven- to twelve-year olds) and 35 adult native speakers of German listened to stem forms of verbs presented in a sentential context and were…

A progress report is presented of a study which applies a system of generative grammar to error analysis. The objective of the study was to reconstruct the grammar of students' interlanguage, using a systematic analysis of errors. (Interlanguage refers to the linguistic competence of a student who possesses a relatively systematic body of rules,…

This paper discusses the meaning of the term "lexical simplification" in the context of second language acquisition. It is suggested that simplification be viewed as a universal feature of language use which may be manifested in a number of linguistic contexts, including the creation of a learner's interlanguage. It is further suggested…

This article discusses error correction in the writing and speaking of foreign language learners. If it is decided that student errors should be corrected, should all errors be corrected or only particular ones? How should errors be corrected, when, and by whom? (CFM)

A study was conducted to test various explanations of the error of unmarked noun plurals made by first generation Italian immigrants. The error appeared to be "fossilized" or not eradicated over a period of time. (SW)

Some empirical data are presented concerning the use of cloze tests to measure children's proficiency in a bilingual educational program. The subjects were grade five students in their sixth year of a primary French immersion program. (Author/CFM)

Follows up on a study by Dagut and Laufer (1985), who found that Hebrew learners of English avoid phrasal verbs. Three tests (multiple choice, memorization, and translation) were administered to Dutch learners of English to determine whether Dutch learners would tend not to avoid English phrasal verbs because they do not exist in Dutch. (Author/OD)

This study is a partial replication of a set of studies conducted to investigate the effects of unequal status on speech variation. It was found that, in some respects, first- and second-language variation may be quantitatively different. (52 references) (JL)

A collection of 14 papers in contrastive linguistics includes: "Some Comments on Language Data in Contrastive Analysis" (Ruta Nagucka); "Contrastive Sociolinguistics Reconsidered" (Karol Janicki); "Variations in Polish Nasal /e/: A Contribution to the Development of Contrastive Sociolinguistic Methodology" (Jane…

A study investigated the way in which children make use of morphemic information when they are learning to spell. Specifically, it examined the use of morphemic information in spelling compound words; the use made of morphemic information when adding suffixes to words, and the way the morphological rule governing the formation of the past tense is…

This paper analyzes spoken usage of English prepositions by two groups of Ontarian elementary students at the Grade 2 and Grade 5 levels. The first group (29 subjects) consists of bilingual Franco-Ontarian students from Welland and Sudbury. The second group (8 subjects) is composed of monolingual English students from Toronto. Examination of the…

In an attempt to answer some of the questions concerning the roles of syntactic vs. semantic cues and the similarities and/or differences between the first (L1) and second (L2) language reading strategies, a pilot study was conducted with 47 English-speaking students enrolled in French as a second language classes at a bilingual, English-French…

Forty-three children, 2;11 to 5;6, described six familiar activities: making cookies, going to the grocery, having a birthday party, going to a restaurant, getting dressed, and having a fire drill. They described each event three times. The descriptions were elicited by initially asking "What happens when...?" or "What do you do when...?" and then…

Native speakers of Egyptian Arabic make errors in their pronunciation of English that cannot always be accounted for by a contrastive analysis of Egyptian analysis of Egyptain Arabic and English. This study focuses on three types of errors in the pronunciation of voiced and voiceless "th" made by fluent speakers of English. These errors were noted…

This study attempts to assess the developmental psycholinguistics hypothesis that language acquisition strategies are universal. Four types of statements were focused upon: (1) true affirmative statements (e.g., "You are a child"), (2) false affirmative statements ("You are a baby"), (3) false negative statements ("You aren't a child"), and (4)…