Argues that "information structure management" is an important and problematic part of the competence sought by nonnative speakers, particularly for goal-related discourse types where clarity and argumentative power play a role. Simulated negotiation material is used to demonstrate how certain nonnative structures hamper the…

Tested preschool monolingual speakers of Spanish and English in their native countries on classification of familiar objects through a task assessing strategies in a free sort, a sort with instructions to use natural gender, and one for the Spanish speakers with instructions to use grammatical gender. Results suggest that instructional context and…

Compares the acquisition of the English to- and for-dative alternation by native-speaking English, Japanese, and Korean children. Investigates whether second language learners (L2) like native language learners overextend the double-object variant and whether L2 learners, like L2 adults, transfer properties of the native language grammar.…

Analysis of learner language (LL), the foreign-language learner's utterances, can provide insight into the second-language acquisition process. Various models of first- and second-language acquisition are reviewed, characteristics of LL are discussed, and the role of instruction in second-language acquisition is considered. (IAH)

A contrastive analysis of Edo (Bini) and English reveals problems that Edo first language speakers may encounter in learning English-as-a-Second-Language, and identifies the potential problem areas: 1) the consonant system; 2) allophones and their distribution; 3) syllable structure; and 4) suprasegmental features. (Author/VWL)

Although Eskimo languages are commonly characterized as displaying rather "free" word order compared to major western European languages, West Greenlandic (WG) has a clearly dominant, pragmatically neutral ordering pattern. It is argued that WG behaves more like Slavic languages. (Contains 36 references.) (LB)

The function of word order is examined in light of interference in the learning of English discourse by Chinese speakers and vice versa. Emphasis on different devices in coding discourse functions is shown to be reflected in interference between the two languages. (13 references) (LB)

Traces the history of Africans in Mexico and the Costa Chica and compares elements of the regional speech as described in a 1958 study with data collected on-site in 1991-1992. Findings indicate that the successful introduction of public education coupled with the ubiquity of the mass media have reduced or eliminated the more distinctively…

Examines the perception of four English vowels by adult native speakers of German. The role of foreign-language experience in the perception of second-language vowels was examined through labeling responses to members of synthetic continua in which vowel duration and spectrum were varied factorily. (42 references) (GLR)

Discusses differences in academic discourse presentation, including preference for the use of first person singular "I" in some languages vs. the "we" perspective in others. Data are presented concerning employment of the two perspectives in English, German, French, Russian, and Bulgarian research articles in linguistics.…

Argues for a fundamental structural similarity between serial verb constructions, widely known from Kwa languages, and v-v compounds in Japanese. A major theoretical implication of the analysis is that it supports an analysis of clausal structure where the external argument is not included in the immediate projection of a verb but is introduced by…

Compares the ability of English speakers and Portuguese speakers to learn two complex rhythm patterns observed in languages with primary word stress. Subjects were familiarized with one of two rhythms during a discrimination task, followed by a recognition task that tested whether knowledge of the rhythm generalized to novel stimuli.(Author/VWL)

To test whether cognitive processing in bilingual depends on script combinations and language proficiency, this study investigated the development of alphabetic and logographic visual search strategies in two kinds of biscriptals: (1) Malay-English and (2) Chinese-English readers. Results support the view that there are script implications of…

The author of a paper of Translation Quality Assessment and the training of translators responds to criticisms, focusing on the problems of a contrastive/comparative linguistics approach to translation, the complexity of the translation task, and the issue of translator subjectivity. (MSE)

Connectionist accounts of inflectional morphology have focused on domain of English past tense in which default process (add/ed) reflects process of suffixation adopted by majority of forms in the language. Arabic plural system is one where a minority default process operates. The study contrasts two types of default process that might lead to a…