Two experimental paradigms, a picture-naming task and a Stroop interference task, were employed to address the structure of the multilingual mental lexicon; more specifically, the process of multilingual non-selective lexical access. German-English-French speakers named objects in their native and most dominant language in a task that included a…

Muysken argues for four general "strategies" that characterize language contact phenomena across several levels of description. These strategies are (A) maximize structural coherence of the first language (L1); (B) maximize structural coherence of the second language (L2); (C) match between L1 and L2 patterns where possible; and (D) use…

The term ethnoreconstruction has been coined to refer to a strategy by which a speaker of one language or dialect attempts to speak a related language or dialect by systematically transforming the elements. The process is discussed with reference to several languages. (CHK)

A study was designed to ascertain whether syntactic avoidance behavior could be demonstrated for two groups of ESL learners (native speakers of Arabic and of Spanish and Portuguese) in accordance with contrastive analysis difficulty predictions. An avoidance pattern was found in accordance with such predictions. (CHK)

The internalized grammar of the bilingual is different from that of a monolingual. The bilingual has, in addition to the entries that are proper to each of the two languages he speaks, certain union entries. These are extensive in the case of the Spanish/English bilingual since there are many items in the two languages that manifest systematic…

The research discussed here, primarily that of P.J. Gal'perin and his associates at the University of Moscow, is an experimental demonstration of basic tenets of Vygotsky's theory. According to Gal'perin, grammatical knowledge is formed first by teaching the students material grammatical actions; these actions are ultimately to become mental…

This paper summarizes the results of a longitudinal study of a child native speaker of French acquiring English. The observation period covered the child's progress from age 4 years, 9 months to age 5 years, 8 months. An analysis was made of the acquisition of the interrogative and negative structures and of nine grammatical morphemes. In…

Error analysis is considered both a part of the methodology for the psycholinguistic investigation of the second language acquisition process as well as a part of the teaching-learning methods and materials re-evaluation process. The language acquisition process is a dynamic process governed by the principles of hypothesis formulation, testing and…

The most significant criterion for classifying spelling errors is whether the erroneous form yields the same pronunciation as the intended word. Five categories can be discerned: (1) non-identical pronunciation, non-existent English word; (2) non-identical pronunciation, confusion of existing words; (3) identical pronunciation, English spelling…

English-speaking monolinguals named colors as quickly as possible when the color stimuli were color names written either in English or a number of other languages. Color naming was found to be slowest for English words and increased in speed as the foreign color names become less similar to their English equivalents. In a second experiment,…

This study is a detailed analysis of the phonological development of Sylvia, a bilingual child, in her acquisition of American English and Brazilian Portuguese from the age of 1 year, 7 months to 3 years, 8 months. The study is divided into four stages: ages 1.7 - 1.9; 1.9 - 2.1; 2.1 - 2.3; and 2.3 - 2.8. Up to the age of 1.9, the same…

This longitudinal study of bilingual language acquisition analyzes the order of acquisition of English grammatical morphemes in a child bilingual in English and Chichewa (a Bantu lanugage of East Central Africa). The order of acquisition obtained is compared to that obtained by Brown (1973) for monolingual English speaking children and that…

Reports on an eight month study examining the development of turn-allocation devices in children acquiring English as a second language. The role of prior language experience in second language learning is explored. (Author/AM)

This book presents a three-part discussion of the causes and prevention of errors in foreign language learning with particular reference to English as a second language. The first part provides a survey of error analysis, defining what is meant by the term "error" and establishing a model of error production. Other terms explained in this section…

The main concern of this report is the nature of the reliance by children on prior native language (L1) knowledge in naturalistic, untutored second language (L2) acquisition. It is suggested that L1 reliance is systematic, in that specific conditions have to be met within the child's L2 development before he or she will, or can, draw on previous…