This paper looks into the dilemma of what counts as a grammatical 'learner error' in ELT on the basis of recent results from English variationist research and English as a lingua franca research. Examples from these studies show that features often perceived as 'errors' for EFL speakers also occur in ESL production--where they are called…

This paper compares the initial state of second language (L2) and third language (L3) acquisition for English articles to examine the influence of L2 proficiency on positive transfer from L2 to L3. We tested 36 L1 Turkish/L2 German adolescent learners of L3 English (L3 group), 41 L1 Turkish adolescent learners of L2 English (L2 group), and 10…

L2 learners' problems with English articles have been linked to learners' L1 and their access to universal semantic features (e.g., definiteness and specificity). Studies suggest that L2 adults rely on their L1 knowledge, while child L2 learners rely more on their access to semantic universals. The present study investigates whether child L2…

Certain ill-formed phonological structures are systematically under-represented across languages and misidentified by human listeners. It is currently unclear whether this results from grammatical phonological knowledge that actively recodes ill-formed structures, or from difficulty with their phonetic encoding. To examine this question, we gauge…

In response to new theoretical claims and inconclusive empirical findings regarding relative clauses in East Asian languages, this study examined the factors relevant to relative clause production by Korean heritage speakers. Gap position (subject vs. object), animacy (plus or minus animate), and the topicality of head nouns (plus or minus…

This dissertation investigates the acquisition of early verb inflection in child Slovenian from morphosyntactic and morphophonological perspectives. It centers on the phenomenon of root nonfinites, particularly the patterns of omission and substitution errors in verb inflection marking. It argues that every acquisition model needs to account…

Three- and four-year-old children were asked to perform a judgement task in which they chose between incorrect English transitives and intransitives and their correct adult equivalents. Purely semantic or syntactic models fail to explain the findings as well as does a model based on semantic/syntactic transitivity. (SED)

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…

Error analysis of the informal conversations (in both the interlanguage [IL] and native language) of two native Vietnamese speakers gave limited support to the hypothesis that a universal preference for the open syllable is a shaping force in IL phonology that is independent of the process of native language transfer. (Author/CB)

It is argued here that childhood phonological errors systematically simplify the child's inventory of phonetic elements and strings. (Author/KM)

Describes a study of two Polish speakers learning English, which investigated whether modifications of complex syllable structures in the interlanguage were attributable to transfer and whether they showed movement toward an open syllable pattern. Of the modifications not attributable to transfer, only half showed movement toward an open syllable…

Goodluck and Solan (EJ 205 641) presented alternative formulations about why errors predicted by basic operations fail to occur and suggested a refined hypothesis. Each aspect of their argument is addressed, and it is concluded that descriptive power, methodology and principles for restricting error predictions favor our original analysis. (RD)

Longitudinal observation of one- to three-year-olds' (N=2) acquisition of complement phrasal construction in Korean found that, in spite of typological differences between English and Korean, both syntactic and semantic characteristics were shared by children acquiring complement structure in the two languages. (Author/CB)

Deals with the issue of sentence processing in a second language (L2) showing how L2 learners resolve the problem of competing factors of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics in the processing of L2 utterances. The results of a study involving sentence interpretation by L2 learners of English are presented. (Author/SED)

Analysis of the responses of Spanish, Chinese, and German learners of English-as-a-Second-Language to English sentences with empty pronominal categories found that, although empty pronouns were pragmatically more natural in finite clauses of Spanish and Chinese than in English or German, only the Spanish subjects had significantly higher mean…