Bilingual speakers must acquire the phonemic inventory of 2 languages and need to recognize spoken words cross-linguistically; a demanding job potentially made even more difficult due to dialectal variation, an intrinsic property of speech. The present work examines how bilinguals perceive second language (L2) accented speech and where…

This study presents a grammatical analysis of the Kanuri language as it is spoken in Yerwa, the capital of Borno State in Nigeria. The material is organized in such a way as to be useful to students of the Kanuri language, to linguists, and to Kanuri people interested in the grammar of their language. The text is organized in pedagogical order…

Examines the semantic/pragmatic constraints on null objects spoken in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) in detail, and situates BP null objects in the broader crosslinguistic perspective of differential object marking. Demonstrates that semantic/pragmatic dimensions of animacy and specificity, and in particular their interaction, must be taken into…

The growing secularization of Israeli lifestyle and the increasing influence of foreign languages as manifested in the local media have given rise to new forms of language secularization. This article discusses and provides examples of the secularization of Hebrew, which has split modern Hebrew into two varieties--religious and secularized. (13…

Analyzed longitudinal data from 28-year-old Cambodian man who, despite instruction in English-as-Second-Language and residence in English-speaking community, used form "has" for both possessives (PO) and existentials (EX). Shared semantic properties of PO/EX, together with syntactic, pragmatic, perceptual characteristics of native…

Investigates the acquisition of temporality in English by Korean speakers over a period of 24 months. Temporality is examined from two perspectives: the expression of past-time events and semantic aspect and verb morphology. Results are discusses. (Author/VWL)

Dutch-English bilinguals performed a generalized lexical decision task on triplets of items, responding with "yes" if all items wee correct Dutch and/or English words, and with "no" if one or ore of the items was not a word in wither language. Semantic priming effects were found in on-line response times. Event-related…

Presents data from the Spanish of Quechua-Spanish bilinguals that exemplify a contact situation that gives rise to a process called structural interference. Concentrates on the use of the diminutive in the Spanish of speakers of Spanish in the Andes. (Author/VWL)

Within a psycholinguistic approach to second language learning, an attempt is made to investigate the question of how morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics affect the comprehension of Dutch sentences by nonnative learners of that language. When talking to nonnative language-learners, native speakers often tend to deliberately modify their…

Study of the probabilistic nature of processing strategies in Dutch/English bilinguals indicated that sentence interpretation in English generally paralleled that in Dutch, with divergence toward similarity in performance by English monolinguals. (Author/CB)

This Marathi-English dictionary is intended for the adult student learning Marathi through the medium of English. It contains approximately 10,000 entries, most of which are basic words from which others can be derived. The words constitute a basic vocabulary, including the current meanings, and excluding obsolete meanings. In some cases, the…

Investigates the processes involved in the learning of Arabic subject-verb agreement by Australians. It is hypothesized that the amount and direction of information encoding motivated by certain semantic categories as well as the availability of discourse cues would influence the learners' performance in subject-verb agreement tasks. (27…

Argues that translation can be an effective learning tool for English speakers learning Chinese if semantic and discourse analysis are incorporated. Examples are given to illustrate various problems in such translation, including the division between state and action verbs, and the nonuse of -LE with verbs in past meaning. (15 references) (JL)

Investigates whether Spanish- and Turkish-speaking learners of English discover the semantic and syntactic constraints on the causative/inchoative alternation in the absence of overt morphological clues. Results of a picture judgment task show that second language learners do discover these properties and that overall verbs appear to cluster in…

This study examines the role of interlanguage transfer in lexico-semantic development in adult native Japanese-speaking learners of English as a second language in reference to two questions: (1) what constrains the initial hypothesis the student makes about the new target language word? and (2) what constrains a restructuring process of a…