An interactional approach for studies of English as a nonnative language is proposed. The approach entails the adoption of ethnomethodological perspectives on social knowledge, combined with conversation analytic interests in detailing the locally managed character of spoken interaction, and introducing the term "lingua franca" English to describe…

Argues that psychological constructs prevalent during the 1950s and early 1960s encountered serious challenges when they were applied to African-American children. Specifies the way in which these challenges influenced the direction of developmental theory and research. (RJC)

Refutes the reanalysis of a phonologically disordered child's use of fricatives as developed by Fey (1989) within a relational framework. Evidence in the form of nonsystematic correspondence between the child's substitution patterns and the target sound system is used to further establish accuracy of the original independent generative analysis…

Examines the phonetic patterns and linguistic development of an infant who was tracheostomized during the period that infants normally begin to produce syllabic vocalization. It was found that the infant had developed only a tenth of the canonical syllables expected in normally developing infants, a small inventory of consonant-like segments, and…

Study of the pragmatics of politeness conventionally draws on conversational data, but can be extended to some genres of written text. A framework is described that analyzes politeness strategies in terms of impositions (claims and denials of claims) and reveals some stylistic features in scientific papers and in popularizations. (Author/CB)

A review of the significant advances made in the study of Spanish language history during the 1980s describes recent developments in introductory textbooks, manuals, external histories, phonological research, morphological research, syntactic research, semantic research, dictionaries, learned vocabularies, bibliographies, and literary research.…

Discusses a computerized phonetics program called BABEL, which is an expert system able to animate graphically and reproduce acoustically a text in any language that uses the Latin alphabet. The program is designed to assist language learners and instructors in the nuances of phonemes. (22 references) (GLR)

Introduces the Index of Productive Syntax (IPSyn), a new method of evaluating the grammatical complexity of preschool language corpora. Fifty-six syntactic and morphological forms are counted; scores are derived for noun phrases, verb phrases, questions/negations, and sentence structures. Development of this index, its advantages, and its…

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…

Discusses the minimal requirements that any serious theory of language acquisition must meet, including the particular properties of the human language processor and linguistic and nonlinguistic input. A review of literature regarding the role of Universal Grammar in second-language acquisition suggests alternative theories to investigate for…

Argues for a cognitive psychological approach to second-language learning that emphasizes the importance of the development of automaticity and the process of restructuring. It is suggested that language practice can lead to both increased, and occasionally decreased, performance levels, which cognitive psychology may help researchers to…

Describes the linguistic phenomenon of anaphora; surveys the approaches to anaphora undertaken in theoretical linguistics and natural language processing (NLP); presents results of research conducted at Syracuse University on anaphora in information retrieval; and discusses the future of anaphora research in regard to information retrieval tasks.…

Extent of resemblance in the communicative behavior between dyads that share common members was examined by means of linguistic and conversational measures. Findings indicated that although there was considerable consistency in the linguistic output of dyads within a 15-minute interaction, there was no consistency across dyads that shared a common…

Three experiments gauging 7- to 10-year-old children's ability to interpret and comprehend figurative language indicated that informative contexts could improve subjects' abilities to perceive idiomatic meanings. Subjects were less able to produce idioms than to comprehend them, but were able to perceive that language can be both figurative and…

A study of the feminization of personal titles in French is reported, and teaching materials based on the findings are suggested for use in college-level intermediate or advanced language classes. The objective is to help language learners understand the phenomenon of feminization and its practical implications. (Author/MSE)