Developmental Sentence Scoring (DSS) is a measure of spoken syntax that provides a numeric variable, provides some developmental data, and serves an organizing function for asking and answering clinical questions. DSS is useful in making diagnostic judgments, selecting goals and planning treatment, and measuring intervention efficacy. Difficulties…

Analyzes data on the acquisition of German by Italian and Spanish speakers. Findings reveal that children learning a first language and adults learning a second language build up syntactic structure in much the same manner, and propose that the weak continuity approach of language acquisition accounts for all instances of syntactic acquisition.…

Focuses on factors influencing the mastery of a foreign language and one's native tongue. Both the child-mother relationship and the teacher-student relationship greatly influence the desire and propensity of an individual to acquire fluency in the language being taught. To learn to speak signifies a wish to use a language and become immersed in…

The PLS-4 (Preschool Language Scale, 4th edition) is a psychometrically sound instrument constructed to assess language skills in children from birth to 6 years 11 months. It is a useful diagnostic and research tool that can be used to identify current comprehension and expressive language skills and can measure changes in language skills over…

This article is the second part of a report on research that examined immersion language teachers' strategies to modify their speech in order to maintain use of the target language. As described in the first part in "Babel," Volume 40, Number 2 (Veque, 2005), this classroom-based research, undertaken at Methodist Ladies College (MLC) in…

This article examines alternating verbs (such as "quemar"(se) "to burn") in second language (L2) Spanish by considering the learnability problem from a sequence learning perspective (N. Ellis, 1996, 2002). In Spanish, verbs of the alternating class are obligatorily marked with the clitic "se" in their intransitive form. Errors of omission among…

The purpose of this paper is to describe the function of English articles in a functional-pragmatic perspective, to clarify how the functions of the articles are reflected in the discourse, and to give some pedagogical implications for teaching English as a foreign language (EFL). Deixis is a grammatical category involving reference to…

The grammar of the Korean language presented here is descriptive and structural, and does not align with any particular theory. An introductory chapter gives some background information about the language and related research. Subsequent chapters treat: writing and sound systems, including some sound rules and suprasegmental features; morphology…

Papers delivered at the conference on linguistics include: "On the Metrical Unity of Latinate Affixes"; "Epistemic Small Clauses and Null Subjects"; "Scrambling as Non-Operator A'-Movement: Variable vs. Null Epithet"; "Polarity, Inversion, and Focus in English"; "Phrasal Input to Derivational Morphology…

A study examined the relationship of multiple measures of reading and writing at the second and fifth grade levels. Multiple reading tests (measuring vocabulary, word recognition, sentence comprehension, and passage comprehension) and writing tests (evaluating vocabulary diversity and syntactic complexity, and providing qualitative and…

A study investigated patterns in the apparent syntactic errors of native English-speaking, upper-level learners of Arabic as a foreign language. One hundred writing samples, including summaries, criticisms, and free composition, were gathered from a number of university courses. Error types analyzed included articles, subordinate clauses, two-word…

The encoding of Swedish syntactic information in a study of linguistic data processing is described in detail. The choice of syntactic variables and classification criteria, illustrated with examples, is also discussed. In addition, uses of the coding for contrasting languages, as in this study's comparison of Swedish, Finnish, and English word…

A collection of papers relevant to historical linguistics and description and explanation of language change includes: "Decliticization and Deaffixation in Saame: Abessive 'taga'" (Joel A. Nevis); "Decliticization in Old Estonian" (Joel A. Nevis); "On Automatic and Simultaneous Syntactic Changes" (Brian D. Joseph);…

The methodology reported in this paper argues for a synthesis of various theories and methods. First, a synopsis is given of the pedagogical and linguistic approaches that should underlie a successful attempt to teach the contrast in two verb tenses in Portuguese. Secondly, a contrast unique to Portuguese is examined and a multistage approach for…

This guide is intended for use in helping students master the language arts skills necessary to pass the writing skills portion of the General Educational Development examination. It could also be used in adult basic education classes. The following topics are covered in the individual units: capitalization, punctuation, verb tense, subject-verb…