Purpose: This study compared English grammatical performance of bilingual school-age children who spoke either Spanish or Vietnamese at home, focusing on their first-language influence on the acquisition of 13 English grammatical forms. Method: Scores from 30 children on a cloze task were analyzed for accuracy, developmental patterns, and error…

This study compares Spanish morphosyntax error types and magnitude in monolingual Spanish and Spanish-English bilingual children with typical language development (TD) and language impairment (LI). Performance across groups was compared using cloze tasks that targeted articles, clitics, subjunctives, and derivational morphemes in 57 children.…

The optional use of morphology attested in second language learners has been attributed either to a representational deficit or to a "surface" problem with respect to the realization of inflectional affixes. In this article we contribute to this issue by providing empirical data from the early interlanguage of Greek learners of Turkish. Three…

The methodology used to determine readability of English texts (cloze procedure and word lists) is not applicable to foreign-language material. Linguistic variables are proposed as the basis for readability formulas. Contrastive and error analysis are possible strategies. (JB)

Adult skilled and unskilled readers were tested using the cloze procedure, comparing syntactic and lexical errors with materials at varying levels of difficulty. Findings suggest that reading materials for adult basic education students should control not only vocabulary and subject matter, but also the syntactic complexity of the written…

Indicates that college students make use of word length and shape information to decode text and that the context of a passage affects students' knowledge of the syntactic structure and semantic content of that passage. (AEA)

In an attempt to answer some of the questions concerning the roles of syntactic vs. semantic cues and the similarities and/or differences between the first (L1) and second (L2) language reading strategies, a pilot study was conducted with 47 English-speaking students enrolled in French as a second language classes at a bilingual, English-French…

Presents the results of three experiments investigating the time course of grammaticality judgement. The high correlations among the experiments suggest that the incremental tasks assigned were tapping into the same decision-making process as is found online. The article discusses the findings' implications for the error types that do and do not…

In response to the need for dynamic foreign language materials with a communicative focus, this report addresses the relationship between learner characteristics and success in language learning. It suggests that a self-pacing individualized option should be available to students to deal with unique problems. The problems may be dealt with by…