Provides a description of the characteristics of intrasentential language mixing produced by a group of Korean-English bilingual children, with a special focus on the distinction between code switching and borrowing. Data suggest that intrasentential language mixing is determined by the bilingual abilities and preferences of the speaker as well as…

Examined relations between communicative competence and five dimensions of personality in 241 first and second language learning children in the Netherlands. To determine underlying communicative competence of the first and second language learners of Dutch, a broad array of linguistic measures and teacher judgments were collected. Results are…

Investigates the way adult second language (L2) learners of English resolve relative clause attachment ambiguities. Advanced learners of English who were Greek or German native speakers participated in a set of off-line and on-line tasks. Results indicate L2 learners do not process ambiguous sentences of this type in the same way adult native…

Native speakers recorded utterances in three role-play contexts: speech to presyllabic infants, foreign language instruction, and adult conversation. For babytalk, speakers neglected, reduced, or modified lexical tonal information in favor of simplified and clarified intonation contours. The implications regarding tone acquisition in children and…

Investigated the effects of first language word-level reading skills on the development of English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) word-level reading skills. Crosslinguistic analysis indicates that native Arabic and Japanese speakers are likely to encounter different types of ESL word-level reading difficulties. (VWL)

Data are presented on the development of tests of reading skill for primary school pupils in rural Tanzania. Instruction in these schools is in Kiswahili, a regularly spelled language. Three graded tests were developed to test children who had only some letter knowledge, could read single words, or were proficient readers. The tests correlated…

Examined phonemic awareness and pseudoword decoding in kindergarten and first grade Arabic native children. Hypothesized that because Arabic speakers learn to read in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA)--a language structurally distinct from the local form of the language they grow up speaking--linguistic differences between the two varieties would…

Tested the hypothesis that individual differences in immediate-verbal-memory span predict success in second-language vocabulary acquisition. In the two-session study, adult subjects learned 56 English-Finnish translations. Tested one week later, subjects were less likely to remember those words they had difficulty learning, even though they had…