Notes that in a typical word monitoring paradigm, subjects monitor ongoing language input for a pre-designated target word and that independent variables include the nature and position of the target word and the context in which it is embedded. Also notes that forms of this task are suitable for studies with young children and with individuals…

Expands on the authors' (1995) investigation of the parsing performance on "wh"-movement sentences by Chinese-speaking learners of English. The article compares the difficulty second-language learners have in parsing subject "wh"-traces in embedded finite and nonfinite clauses with the problems they have in parsing Garden Path…

This study analyzed error recovery patterns based on eye movement measures of sentence parsing, across reading level and error type, in 10 adolescents with reading disabilities and 10 controls. The groups' error recovery strategies were similar in pattern and frequency; patterns were largely organized, strategic, and efficient; and multiple…

Focuses on the errors made in lexical verb choice in speech by a small group of advanced learners of English. Findings indicate that while these learners may have a broad outline of verb meaning, their knowledge is hazy concerning contextual and collocational restrictions. Advanced learners may require detailed classroom vocabulary work on simple…

This sourcebook contains an organized series of lesson plans for remediating pragmatic problems in adolescents and students of English as a second language (ESL). Introductory material describes the concept and development of pragmatics (the ability to use language as a tool), provides an observation checklist for clinicians to use in identifying…

The purpose of this study was to develop a reliable instrument that could be used by teachers and staff in Colorado to assist in the assessment of oral English language, particularly the syntax and the phonology of first-grade children in bilingual bicultural education (BBE). The study also related the scores of the instrument to seven variables:…

Discusses some general principles for planning corrective instruction and exercises in English as a second language, and follows with examples from the areas of phonemics, phonology, lexicon, idioms, morphology, and syntax. (IFS/WGA)

Deals with the issue of sentence processing in a second language (L2) showing how L2 learners resolve the problem of competing factors of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics in the processing of L2 utterances. The results of a study involving sentence interpretation by L2 learners of English are presented. (Author/SED)

ALICE, a multimedia framework for intelligent computer-assisted language instruction (ICALI) at Carnegie Mellon University (PA), consists of a set of tools for building a number of different types of ICALI programs in any language. Its Natural Language Processing tools for syntactic error detection, morphological analysis, and generation of…

Many recent generativist models attribute grammatical knowledge to young children on the basis that children's language patterns the same way as the target adult language. It has been proposed that the child acquires this knowledge early on in development by a process of parameter setting. Wexler (1996) presents the "Very Early Parameter Setting…

The results from three studies using data provided by the SLOPE Test and oral interviews are reported. The studies include: (1) a comparison of rank orders obtained over a period of time; (2) a comparison of rank orders obtained in instrument-elicited and spontaneous speech; and (3) a comparison of results obtained using two methods of analysis,…

It is theorized that in English, phonology and semantics are involved in speech production, but the two are linked through syntax. This pilot study compared through error analysis the imitation of English sentences as produced by a Spanish-English speaking mother and her two bilingual daughters, ages six and seven, to determine the syntactic…

Analyzes 10 edited essays written by freshmen native and nonnative speakers of English who are novice writers of English. Both groups produced approximately the same number and kinds of sentence level deviations from standard written English, but nonnatives produce fewer faulty structures and more coherent essays with clearer illocutionary guides.…

Thirty-two hearing-impaired adolescents were assessed on comprehension of three anaphoric forms within conjoined sentences: repeated noun, personal pronouns, and null form. The null form anaphora in a semantically acceptable environment, in which some hearing-impaired students apply a deviant object-subject deletion rule, was significantly more…

SPANLAP (SPANish LAnguage Processing) is a computer program which attempts to engage students of Spanish in a free-form written dialog by allowing them to ask questions. The morphological and syntactic parsing process used in SPANLAP is explained. Sample dialog illustrates limitations of the current model. (Author/LMO)