Examines debates involving three speech communities in the United States: standard English, Black English, and Spanish. The analysis focuses on languages in which electoral activities take place and in which public school instruction is conducted. The major American ideologies of language are similar in their denial of linguistic inequality.…

A study investigated proverbial reference in the language of three Chinese graduate students literate in English, contrasting rhetorical use and its contribution to cohesion. Subjects referred to Chinese proverbs frequently, even though they did not help convey meaning well in English, because of emphasis placed on their use in Chinese writing.…

A study analyzed four major classes of discourse marker in Brazilian Portuguese: "ne" and other requests for feedback; "ai," a sequential connector; "ah, bom," and other turn initiators; and "assim," a marker of explanation. Distribution in various discourse functions and sociodemographic conditioning, and…

Analysis of English stress patterns and perceptual pattern of the six Vietnamese tones in code-switching reveals a significant proportion of the high tone group at the point of switching. This, together with the phonological compatibility between Vietnamese tones of high- and mid-level pitch and English stressed/unstressed syllable patterns,…

Examined two hypotheses regarding reading skill development--the script-dependent hypothesis and the central processing hypothesis--by studying the linguistic, cognitive, and basic reading skills of 70 children in grades 1 through 5 learning to read in English (first language) and Persian (second language) concurrently. Findings supported both…

Investigates the cause of avoidance in learning negation in a Korean as a second-language (KSL) situation. Because Korean has two types of negatives--preverbal and postverbal--examination focused on whether students of KSL avoid a certain negative form, and if so, why. (Author/VWL)

A study investigated the syntax and semantics of the word "until" in Standard British English and Singapore English. While the word is used similarly in the two languages, it has uses in Singapore English not available in Standard Spoken English, paralleling the word "dao" in Chinese and suggesting a substrate influence that is…

Investigated the acquisition of base-generated topics in Mandarin Chinese by British students learning Chinese. The hypothesis is not confirmed that it would not be difficult for English speakers to acquire the base-generated topic in Chinese because in the acquisition of Chinese, English-speaking learners are exposed to positive evidence of…

Investigates the role of morphological structure in the representation and processing of Mandarin Chinese compounds. Results provide evidence against single-layer, morpheme-based models of the Chinese mental lexicon, pointing instead to a two-layer, whole-word and morphemic model (the Multi-Level Cluster Representation Model). (67 references)…

Offers additional means of evaluating parent speech by examining frequencies of individual nouns, verbs, and descriptors, and examining the learning task presented to children. Study one examines transcripts from the CHILDES database of English-speaking parents' speech to children at five developmental levels; study two examines 50 transcripts of…

The main assumption in this article is that the pragmatics of the variety of South African English commonly referred to as black South African English (BSAE) have been shaped, over time, by educated bilinguals, through a transfer of features from African languages. Transfer of syntactic forms, now firmly established in the variety, is evidenced…

This article describes the development of an English spelling measure designed to assess the progress made by Spanish-English bilingual children from Grade 2 to Grade 5. Different stages of developing the measure are described, such as selecting the focus features, the prepilot and pilot phases, and the operational version. Two underlying…

Receding languages in contact with an expanding language are susceptible to various forms of transfer, including covert transfer or negative borrowing, the elimination of features not shared by the expanding language. Retention of two Scottish Gaelic grammatical features with English parallels and of two grammatical features without English…

An analysis of the structure of possessive-adjective phrases (e.g., "women's new suitcases, new women's suitcases") in English looks at some data that appear to conflict with the intuitive order of S-structure possessives preceding adjectives. A solution to this apparent anomaly is proposed: it is not the compounding of possessive-noun…

A study investigated the use of negative polarity items (NPIs) in child language, and in particular, how children acquire the restrictions on these items. Data are drawn from studies of NPIs in the spontaneous speech of Dutch- and English-speaking children. Results show the first NPIs to appear in Dutch and English are widely different…