A study investigated differences in English word recognition in native speakers of Indonesian (an alphabetic language) and Chinese (a logographic languages) learning English as a Second Language. Results largely confirmed the hypothesis that an alphabetic first language would predict better word recognition in speakers of an alphabetic language,…

Investigates children's early lexical development in English and Korean and compares caregivers' linguistic input in the two languages. Results indicate that young Korean children use verbs productively with appropriate inflections and that, unlike in English, both verbs and nouns in Korean are dominant categories from the single-word stage. (39…

This paper introduces a method for computer-based analyses of metaphor in discourse, combining quantitative and qualitative elements. This method is illustrated with data from research on German newspaper discourse concerning the ongoing system transformations of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Methodological aspects of the research procedure are…

Concept maps are being used by an increasing number of educators in Europe and the US. This paper has four goals. First, it discusses problems in developing Novak's style concept maps in Turkish caused by linguistic differences between Turkish and English. Second, it reports the findings of a research study conducted to adapt concept maps to…

Contrastive rhetoric scholarship researches rhetorical structures across languages to predict the difficulties experienced by students learning to write essays in a second language. The paradigmatic contrast is between Western languages (e.g., English) that are said to exemplify "linearity" and "directness" and Eastern languages (e.g., Chinese,…

It is often the case that undergraduates writing essays to fulfil course requirements have an academic audience (i.e. lecturer/s marking the essay) as their target readers. These texts may represent a form of academic writing by novice writers in the process of learning academic discourse and conventions. Though these texts may not be comparable…

This study investigates the problems that translators and Arab learners of English encounter in translating Arabic sentences containing the Arabic discourse marker "fa" into English. Several types of texts were surveyed in order to identify the salient functions that this marker has in Arabic discourse. Five major functions were identified:…

Purpose: Recent research suggests that nonword repetition (NWR) and sentence repetition (SR) tasks can be used to discriminate between children with SLI and their typically developing age-matched (TDAM) and younger (TDY) peers. Method: Fourteen Cantonese-speaking children with SLI and 30 of their TDAM and TDY peers were compared on NWR and SR…

A study extended previous research on second language learners' use of interlanguage knowledge in making grammaticality judgments. The grammatical construction under consideration is the existential-presentational (E-P) sentence. This construction is described, and it is shown how, due to universal constraints of information structure, it is…

The monograph on the North Alaskan dialect of Inupiaq, an Eskimo language, makes a phonological comparison of the two sub-dialects, Barrow and Kobuk. An introductory section outlines basic word structure and standard orthography, and gives an overview of the dialects' phonology. Subsequent sections give an extensive phonological analysis of these…

The continua model of bilteracy offers a framework in which to situate research,teaching, and language planning in linguistically diverse settings. Using this model, and citing examples of Cambodian and Puerto Rican students in Philadelphia's public schools as illustrative of the challenge facing American educators, this paper suggests that the…

Seven original research papers by faculty and students of the Linguistics Department and other related departments of the University of Kansas are presented. The titles and authors are as follows: "Particles in Tojolabal Mayan Discourse" (Jill Brody); "One Hundred Years of Lakota Linguistics (1887-1987)" (Willem J. de Reuse);…

A study is reported that investigated American children's use of subjects in early speech and compared this cross-sectional data to longitudinal data on Italian children's production of subjects. Twenty-one American children aged 1.10 to 2.8 years were recorded in mother-child interactions and grouped by mean length of utterance (MLU) produced.…

A study compared language patterns in a group of 100 residents of Ottawa and 240 residents of Vancouver, categorized by sex, age (under or over 40), and socioeconomic status. The informants provided tape-recorded interviews of an hour or more in response to similarly-conducted questionnaires designed to elicit tokens for a large number of…

A discussion of some occurrences of metaphor in Modern Greek is intended to offer insight to foreign language teachers on the handling of the phenomenon in classroom instruction. Some implications for machine translation are also suggested. First, a brief theoretical account of metaphor points out that metaphor occurs in nearly all discourse and…