Reports on a project on trilingualism currently in progress. A brief literature review indicates the diversity of trilingualism and trilingual situations. The article then focuses on three sets of trilinguals in Melbourne, Australia, Dutch-German-English, Hungarian-German-English, and Italian-Spanish-English, and considers interlingual strategies…

Examines recent studies of linguistic corpora in Italian, and presents the results of an analysis of "piace" and "piacciono" conducted on a corpus of 3.5 million words of written Italian, accessible at the University of Birmingham in England. Focuses on pedagogical applications of the data and on the inductive methodologies…

Discusses ways of using second language acquisition (SLA) research in teaching, and argues that the correct use of SLA research should meet a set of overlapping requirements. The requirements are then applied to three sample areas of research: the question of age-effects in second language learning, the acquisition of phonology, and the…

Argues that multiple language use in learner output is not always and exclusively indicative of the deficient nature of the language learner with respect to an idealized monolingual second language linguistic norm. Multilingual written learner texts and learners' explications of these texts are examined in detail. (Author/VWL)

Examines sentence matching, a methodology frequently used in the second language literature to determine notions of grammaticality of nonnative speakers. Native speakers of French and second language learners of French performed a sentence-matching task focusing on three areas of French grammar: adverb placement, subject-verb agreement, and…

Provides an overview of the field of literacy studies, describing the range of work that has been covered and identifying current unresolved issues as ways of suggesting future directions and showing ways that literacy can be seen as an integral part of language. (Author/VWL)

Recently, talk of a new type of learning disability (LD)--a foreign language learning disability, or FLLD--has made its way into the LD and foreign language (FL) literature. However, no empirical evidence has been published to support the concept of a "disability" for FL learning by those professionals who use the term. In this article, the author…

It is well known that English and Dutch children often allow pronouns to refer to local ccommanding antecedents, the so-called Principle B Delay. A similar observation has been made for English agrammatics. This phenomenon, which we call the Pronoun Interpretation Problem (PIP), has been argued to be due to children's and agrammatics' difficulties…

We show how emergence offers new explanations for the behaviour of metaphorically-used expressions. Analysis of metaphors in two types of natural language data are combined: detailed analysis of continuous discourse, which offers wealth of context and the possibility of monitoring emergent forms as the discourse unfolds, and computer-assisted…

Rating scales are commonly used to study voice quality. However, recent research has demonstrated that perceptual measures of voice quality obtained using rating scales suffer from poor interjudge agreement and reliability, especially in the midrange of the scale. These findings, along with those obtained using multidimensional scaling (MDS), have…

Nearly 40 years have passed since the publication of Rubin's renowned study on Paraguayan bilingualism. The present study compares the results of surveys conducted in the years 2000-2001 with data from Rubin's 1960-1961 investigation. The main objective of this study is to examine the linguistic changes that have occurred in four decades and the…

This paper reviews briefly the close relationship that foreign language research has sustained with social and political power since the emergence of applied linguistics as a field of scientific inquiry and, more recently, with the demands of economic competitiveness and national security. It examines two debates that capture well the conflicting…

This study investigated the development of visual chunking skills in the processing of Chinese characters among Hong Kong pupils. One-hundred-seventy-nine primary school students from first, second and fourth grades were administered a character copying task. Children as young as 6 years of age were aware of character units and were able to apply…

Three experiments investigated the effects of rime consistency on reading and spelling among developing readers ranging in age from 7 to 11 years. Experiment 1 found that children read words with inconsistent feedforward mappings between orthography and phonology (O [right arrow] P) less accurately than consistent words. OP consistency interacted…

In 4 experiments, the authors addressed the mechanisms by which grammatical gender (in Italian and German) may come to affect meaning. In Experiments 1 (similarity judgments) and 2 (semantic substitution errors), the authors found Italian gender effects for animals but not for artifacts; Experiment 3 revealed no comparable effects in German. These…