This is a quarterly report of a project involving the analysis of the language of four Puerto Rican children living in the Boston area who are learning Spanish as a first language. The children, all male, ranged in age from 17 months to 37 months during the period of study. All had some contact with English. The data were transcriptions of…

This report consists of two major sections. The first describes the theory and methodology of the Romanian-English Contrastive Analysis Project (RECAP), and the second section presents the first aberrant corpus in RECAP. Also provided are a list of signs and abbreviations and three annexes consisting of two translation exercises and one…

Describes ongoing research into errors in spontaneous speech. (RM)

Reports on an experiment to check whether the use of articles by Italian preschool children corresponds to that of their English counterparts and on a second experiment to investigate the probability that subjects might produce the correct response distribution by following a rule based on the speaker's familiarity with the referent, not the…

Discusses approaches and problems in teaching English as a second dialect writing. Also discusses the kinds of clues student writings provide on the students' progress in mastery of standard English. (EKN)

Investigates the influence of time pressure and focus of attention on the correct use of two Dutch word order rules in the speech of 32 adult learners of the language. The relation between explicitness of rule knowledge, assessed in an interview, and rule application, elicited in the experiment, is also discussed. (EKN)

Describes a study of "analogy" and "interference" errors in the syntax of second language learners. (Author/RM)

Presents and analyzes two studies designed to test native speaker reaction to certain types of errors that speakers of English make when learning German. Aim was to establish the role of the medium, spoken or written, in evaluation of errors. Results show overall ratings of errors in written and spoken language are similar, although with…

Investigates the relationships between the occurrence of mazes (garbles, word tangles, or false starts), sentence complexity, and the use of connectives in 20 fifth-grade students. (HOD)

Examines 158 examples of malapropisms and determines three possible sources of this type of error: (1) childhood errors that were never corrected, (2) other kinds of imperfect learning, and (3) breakdown in the storage and retrieval system of the mental lexicon. (AM)

Confirms previous observations about the tonal character of English stress. Notes that Finnish listeners relied on duration as the perceptual cue for noun/noun phrase distinction (blackbird/black bird), reflecting the absence of linguistic contrasts based on an active use of the larynx in standard Finnish stress and intonation. (Author/RL)

A six-year-old with a language problem responded consistently to 100 locative commands by putting objects in containers and on flat surfaces regardless of the preposition or order of the nouns in the commands. (Author/CL)

Through analyses of text corpora, sentence completion, and self-paced reading, examined role of structurally defined parsing principles, local information (lexically specific biases), and contextual information (referential pragmatics) in resolving syntactic ambiguities. Subjects were 32 undergraduate native English speakers. Found that local and…

In a study of the application natural language processing to second-language instruction, two versions of the Nihongo-CALI (computer-assisted language instruction) system were developed. Empirical data support the possibility/effectiveness of intelligent CALI to facilitate second-language acquisition. (19 references) (LB)

Part one of this study discussed the characteristics of errors involving single fricative consonants made by English children learning their first language. Here, the second part discusses the distinctive features of the single fricatives most commonly mispronounced, as well as the characteristics of errors with clustered fricatives. (34…