Discusses syntactic and stylistic errors in the language of advertising and the reason for these linguistic irregularities. Suggests ways of dealing with the problem. (EL)

Presents examples of interference phenomena, lexical, grammatical, and orthographic, which occurred in the translation section of examinations given to prospective teachers of English in German university-preparatory high schools. The elements of error are analyzed, and corrected versions are supplied. (IFS/WGA)

Environmentally contaminated speech errors (irrelevant words or phrases derived from the speaker's environment and erroneously incorporated into speech) are hypothesized to occur at a high level of speech processing, but with a relatively late insertion point. The data indicate that speech production processes are not independent of other…

Reports on a study of a normally developing boy who made pronominal errors for about 10 months. Comprehension and production data clearly indicate that the child persistently made pronominal errors because of semantic confusion in the use of first- and second-person pronouns. (28 references) (GLR)

Investigates those words which cause students the most difficulty in usage by collecting data to determine the extent of their misuse. Lists the 75 most frequently misused words, and suggests that teachers focus on these in their classes. (PRA)

Errors involving universal quantification are common in contexts depicting sets of individuals in partial, one-to-one correspondence. In this article, we explore whether quantifier-spreading errors are more common with distributive quantifiers each and every than with all. In Experiments 1 and 2, 96 children (5- to 9-year-olds) viewed pairs of…

Little attention has been devoted to date to the study of morphological knowledge in individuals with developmental dyslexia. The current study compares the ability of Hebrew-speaking adult dyslexic students and gradeschool children to analyze written words into their morphological components, using a linguistic analogy task. Two sets of…

An error analysis was made of 26 essays written by English-speaking honor students in their first year of university German. Results illustrate the relative frequency of errors occurring in the sample, together with some possible explanations for certain types of errors. (SED)

Presents four chief categories of common mistakes in French along with some of their causes and cures. (EKN)

Challenges the prevalent misconception among many students that the grammatical gender system of Spanish is transparent. Data concerning the number of exceptions in gender assignment in Spanish is presented along with samples of student production. (VWL)

Investigated the hierarchical organization of the semantic system in preschoolers with and without word-finding deficits. Children named a series of objects at multiple levels of the noun hierarchy in response to contrast questions. Children with word-finding deficits had similar abilities to the other children but did not have enough stored…

Five experiments, using a subject-verb agreement error elicitation procedure, investigated syntactic planning processes in production. The experiments examined the influence of semantic integration--the degree to which phrases are tightly linked at the conceptual level--and contrasted two accounts of planning: serial stack-based systems and…

Swedes in four different age groups (9, 12, 15 and 18 years) judged written words which varied in three dimensions: syntactic category, objective frequency, and polysemy (multiple meaning). The subjects judged ease of comprehension of 24 words in a factorial arrangement. The method used was Thurstone's paired comparisons. A predicted complex…

This study examined the sensitivity of adult second language learners to deviance in English sentences. The subjects were 18 Egyptian, Arabic-speaking students attending classes at the English Language Institute of the American University in Cairo. (Author/CFM)

Discusses the production of anomalous sentences by non-native students of the Japanese language and suggests that the primary cause of various errors indicated in such sentences is the confusion with English "when." In addition, it is suggested that error analysis can help clarify the nature of grammatical problems and facilitate learning of…