Special issue devoted to the topic of standard spoken usage. (VM)

When 16 parents' and 13 nonparents' conversations with children were examined for evidence of adults' differential responses to children's syntactic, phonological, and semantic errors, results indicated that adults tended to respond differentially to children's language mistakes, with parents showing greater sensitivity than non-parents. (RH)

Data from a longitudinal study matching language-disordered and linguistically normal children are used to assess reading development from grade one to grade four. It is shown that good comprehenders use meaningful units more frequently than do poor comprehenders, that their reading errors are more often negligible, and that they violate syntactic…

A research project is discussed involving the collection of production data from writing samples of 375 adult learners of English divided equally among five language backgrounds: Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Persian, and Spanish. Information is presented about three constructions: (1) subject relative clause, (2) infinitival complement on verb, and…

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…

This article describes pedagogic issues in setting objective tests in mechanics using Question Mark Perception, coupled with MathML mathematics mark-up and the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) syntax for producing diagrams. The content of the questions (for a range of question types such as multi-choice, numerical input and variants such as…

In order to determine the knowledge and skills needed by novice programmers to successfully learn computer programming, four studies were conducted using a clinical interview technique. The first study determined that many systematic errors in programming were due to programmers' high-level misconceptions of the nature of the computer and of the…

Urges extended and broadened use of error analysis in school activities because observing how children perform during varied literacy activities can allow clues to their linguistic rules for using oral and written language and the sociolinguistic rules children are discovering in the classroom. (DF)

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…

A study of Hans Christian Andersen's diaries from age 20 to age 70 found that his mean error spelling percentages are equal to contemporaries, but between 2 and 15 times lower than individuals with dyslexia. A structural analysis indicates that the proportion of plausible/implausible errors match those of normal achievers. (Contains references.)…

This report, the fifth in a series of working papers issued by the Project on Applied Contrastive Linguistics (PAKS) at the University of Stuttgart, is dedicated to a consideration of error analysis in language learning, here seen as relevant not only for the teacher but for the text book writer and the curriculum planner as well. An introduction…