Investigated Russian children's color-term acquisition, testing one theory of color universals using acquisition order as a basicness measure and determining whether two terms for blue were genuinely basic. Testing on color-term listing, production, and comprehension indicated that color-term acquisition order agreed with the theory. The two blue…

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 study sought to establish a hierarchy of error gravity for different types of common errors in American learners' spoken Russian by surveying 75 native and nonnative speakers of Russian, including teachers and nonteachers. Grammatical accuracy was considered one of the most important issues in learners' spoken Russian by all the respondents.…

Presents an intelligent computer-assisted language instruction (CALI) system called "Nihongo-CALI" (Japanese Computer Assisted Language Instruction), which employs natural language processing to provide immediate, grammatically sophisticated feedback to students in an interactive environment. The study compares the efficacy of this type…

Focuses on understanding the mechanisms that underlie the production of homophone confusions in writing. The article overviews five experiments demonstrating that the homophone effect can be experimentally induced in French adults. Findings are interpreted in the framework of an activation model. (45 references) (Author/CK)

Investigates whether 11-year-old children in Singapore, from English Dominant or English Non-Dominant backgrounds, read better orally when words were presented in list or text. Finds that readers with less exposure to English relied more on contextual information than more experienced readers, and that reading miscues varied according to whether…

Compares spelling of adult second-language English users with native children and adult first-language users, using data from 1993 NFER survey of L1 children, from a UK university English-as-a-Foreign Language test for overseas students and work by overseas students in England. Comparison showed similar error rates and distribution of errors…

Examined why adults learning second languages make frequent errors in lexical form. More and less fluent bilinguals in English and Spanish performed a translation recognition task in which they had to decide whether the second of two words was the correct translation of the first. Less fluent participants experienced more interference for…

This study investigated different accounts of children's acquisition of non-subject wh-questions. Questions using each of 4 wh-words ("what," "who," "how" and "why"), and 3 auxiliaries (BE, DO and CAN) in 3sg and 3pl form were elicited from 28 children aged 3;6-4;6. Rates of non-inversion error ("Who…

This article reports a quasi-experimental study of how error labeling in remediation exercises affects students' writing performance. Students in five sections of a course in written business communication composed the control group, whereas students in two sections composed the treatment group. On the first letter each group wrote early in the…

An "intelligent" system for constructing computer-assisted pattern drills to be used in second language instruction is proposed. First, some of the difficulties in designing intelligent error analysis are discussed briefly. Two major approaches to error analysis in computer-assisted instruction, pattern matching and parsing, are described, and…

A list of guidelines for error correction in the writing process is presented, as well as a specific classroom application of a correction code and error analysis chart. Although developed for Southeast Asian English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) students, the code could be modified and applied to any target population. The procedure for using the…

It is suggested that contrastive linguistics, the systematic comparison of two languages, be considered in the preparation of instructional materials and as a choice of teaching methods and techniques for training tranlators and interpreters. The contrastive analysis hypothesis suggests that the major source of errors committed by learners of a…

The study evaluated the effects of an auditory monitoring and feedback approach on an adolescent boy's schizophrenic language patterns. The approach attempted to increase the subject's auditory awareness and to train him to identify and correct the linguistic errors of others and, eventually, of himself. Language samples were analyzed at baseline…

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…