Presents a comparison study of language learning in American children and adults using various Japanese locatives. The subjects were pre- and posttested to determine if locatives that were semantically similar to their English equivalents would yield better transfer than terms that deviated in meaning and phonemic structure in English. (BK)

Examines research on learning related vocabulary, such as lexical sets, a unit of vocabulary or specific items sharing certain formal or semantic features. This research shows that learning related words at the same time makes learning them more difficult and suggests that this difficulty can be avoided if related words are learned separately.…

Inexact uses of adverbs by students of Russian which are believed to be caused in part by native language interference are discussed. (RM)

A study of linguistic theories as they apply to translation, which is understood as a translation of ideas, not of words. Topics covered are: lexical structure and polysemy; meaning; structure and polysemy; meaning and "related ideas"; structural linguistics; semantic fields and context. (Text is in French.) (AMH)

Analysis of the performance of second-, fourth-, sixth-grade, and college-level subjects on picture-word interference tasks indicated that distractor words belonging to the same semantic category as pictures produced more interference than either unrelated words or nonsense trigrams. (Author/JMB)

Examines linguistic and extralinguistic factors involved in ascertaining meaning in the simultaneous interpretation process. Extralinguistic cues include: (1)background information; (2) speaker's goals and attitudes toward subject; and (3) the audience. Personal experiences and observations of student interpreters are used as illustrations.…

Study resulting in the conclusion that the semantic relationships between words in the bilingual's languages influence tasks involving secondary memory, whereas no interlingual interference occurs in a second learning situation depending mostly upon primary memory. (Author/FWB)

In the experiments outlined in this article, the authors investigate lexical access processes in language production. In their earlier work, T. Pechmann and D. Zerbst (2002) reported evidence for grammatical category constraints in a picture-word interference task. Although grammatical category information was not activated when subjects produced…

Most current models of speech production predict interference from related context words in picture-naming tasks. However, Glaser and Dungelhoff (1984) reported semantic facilitation when the task was changed from basic-level naming to category-level naming. The authors explore two proposals to account for this change in polarity of the semantic…

Students (N = 124) viewed 14 timed Web pages that distinguished 14 confusing word pairs. In a 2 x 2 factorial design, the authors gave all of the students matrices containing representational pictures for each pair of words, as well as examples of each word in use. One factor in the design was the absence or presence of rules of usage for each…

The ability of children to process words printed in a second language was studied over the course of a school year as the children acquired increasing familiarity with the language. The children, ranging in age from 5 to 15 years, represented four ability groups with respect to their reading skills in their first and second languages. A…

Speakers of Italian often have problems mastering Spanish because they erroneously believe its great similiarity to Italian makes it easy to learn. One of the fundamental problems is the lack of ability to choose the correct verb, "ser" or "estar," both equivalents of the Italian "essere." (Text is in Spanish.) (CFM)