Reports on a content-based elementary Chinese as a foreign language program. Focuses on classroom language activities that are designed and implemented to serve the dual goals of language development and cultural learning. Investigated how classroom activities are organized to integrate culture/content and language learning for young beginners.…

Reviews the rationale for and programmatic structure of two experimental language awareness programs and discusses some of the ethical issues requiring consideration in the implementation of such programs. These ethical considerations include the ethics of persuasion and need, the ethics of representation, the ethics of socio-educational change,…

Examines different approaches to prosodic acquisition: Gerken's S(W) production template; Fikkert's and Archibald's theories of stress acquisition and Demuth and Fee's prosodic hierarchy account. Results reveal that current approaches cannot account for findings in the data such as the increased preservation of final over nonfinal unstressed…

Semantic primitives for time and space, as proposed in Natural Semantic Metalanguage theory, are examined for lexical equivalents in Hong Kong Cantonese. Temporal primitives are all found to have clear Cantonese exponents that can be combined as predicted with other metalanguage elements, with two exceptions. Spatial primitives all appear to have…

Proposes a set of copula forms that should be set aside from variable analysis as instances of "don't count" (DC) forms to allow for systematic comparisons among studies of the English language. Reviews the major alternative descriptions of DC copula cases in the literature and analyzes the behavior of the traditional DC categories. (29…

Provides evidence from a small northern U.S. city for Canadian raising, a Canadian phenomenon that heightens the onset of diphthongs in /ai/ and /au/ relative to the low central onset in neighboring dialects. Findings suggest that the Canadian diphthong varieties may not be conforming to the U.S. norm, but instead that the two varieties are…

Presents six areas in applied linguistics that might be reformed: (1) the hegemonic nature of theories; (2) dictionary-making; (3) language planning; (4) linguistic nomenclatures; (5) the treatment of standard and non-standard varieties; and (6) the delivery of second language programs. Argues that if critical realism guided applied linguistics,…

Reviews the research on ageing, focusing on issues of multi-disciplinarity versus inter-disciplinarity; research orientations to "subject" populations; ethical imperatives in language research; interactivity; and linguistic versus ideological perspectives. Makes a case for considering research on language and ageing as falling within an…

An auditory technique for studying semantic priming and lexical access, single-word shadowing, was applied in three separate experiments: priming in word pairs; priming in sentence context; and comparison of priming in children aged 7-11 and elderly adults. Results indicate that, because shadowing works across ages and does not require reading, it…

A study compared results of referential communication and perspective-taking tasks for 10 high-functioning autistic adolescents and young adults and matched normally developing controls. Autistic subjects showed significant communicative dysfunction and qualitatively different communicative interactions. Possible explanations: deficits in "theory…

Explains the differences between learners with a Japanese-type language as their first language (L1) and those with a Spanish-type language concerning the acquisition of the prohibition of null-subjects in English. Adopts the minimalist program as the theoretical framework for the study. (Author/VWL)

Canadian English-Italian bilingual children were administered phonological, reading, spelling, syntactic, and working memory tasks in both languages. Results suggest English-Italian interdependence is most clearly related to phonological processing but may influence other linguistic modules. Exposure to a language with more predictable…

Reviews recent research on incidental vocabulary acquisition in second language. Discusses key unresolved issues such as the actual mechanism of incidental acquisition, type and size of vocabulary needed for accurate guessing, degree of exposure to a word needed for successful acquisition, efficacy of different word-guessing strategies, value of…

Presents the description and analysis of referees' comments contained in a corpus of 40 peer reviews of short scientific papers written by nonnative speakers of English and known as letters. Results highlight the strongly interpersonal orientation of referees' concerns, with two-thirds of all comments in the corpus focusing on interactional…

Reviews the existing record pertaining to the acquisition of negation in Korean and juxtaposing it with current research in cross-linguistic child language acquisition. (Author/VWL)