Establishes the validity of the Picture Potency Formula as a tool to predict the extent to which children will respond to pictures. (FL)

Examined young children's language productivity with newly learned forms by teaching them four new words: two nouns and two verbs. Findings indicate children combined the novel nouns productively with already known words much more often than they did the novel verbs--by many orders of magnitude and several children pluralized the new nouns,…

Examines the possibility that bilingual experience in infancy may affect the unfolding of vocal precursors to speech. The results of this longitudinal study indicate that infants reared in bilingual and monolingual environments manifested similar ages of onset for canonical babbling (production of well-formed syllables), an event fundamentally…

Reviews recent research into the qualitative and quantitative aspects of fluency to more clearly define the word as a performance descriptor for oral assessment of foreign language learners and as an indicator of progress in language learning. The concept of fluency is confused and multilayered when used in the assessment of oral performance. (22…

Uses interview and telephone survey data to demonstrate that the merger of the vowels in words such as "cot" and "caught," traditionally considered a defining characteristics of the speech of western Pennsylvania, is well established in the mining towns of eastern Pennsylvania. Notes that the data indicate that the merger arose…

The influence of information level on the production of accuracy of 20 children was examined. Data were children's productions of nouns in sets of utterances referring to triplets of pictures representing noun-verb-noun utterances. (Author/JL)

Investigates Japanese as it is spoken in Tokyo within the variationist framework, focusing on the variable (ng). Quantitative analysis was made of the data obtained from sociolinguistic interviews. Findings confirm the existence of inherent variation and orderly heterogeneity. (17 references) (Author/CK)

Lists activities designed to improve students' skills in speaking, writing, singing, and grammar in a foreign language. These activities include talking about resolving a problem situation, writing a narrative in the foreign language being studied, listening to a song and associating its words with images, and engaging in conversation designed to…

Presents a bibliographic survey of works describing the variations in contemporary French seen in regional, social, and stylistic associations. Also takes a critical look at the necessity for this variation from a sociolinguistic viewpoint and examines the potential limits of these varieties in the language. (216 references) (Author/CK)

Reviews the eye-movement paradigm and refers to recent experiments applying the paradigm to issues of spoken word recognition (e.g., lexical competitor effects), syntactic processing, reference resolution, focus, as well as issues in cross-modality integration that are central to evaluating the modularity hypothesis. (Seven references) (Author/CK)

Presents a contrastive statement of the potential that intonation has for differentiating identically worded syntactic patterns in English and German. Focuses on tonality, rehearses some well-known examples of tonality contrasts and introduces some less well-known ones as well, both of which provide examples of syntactic distinctions concealed in…

Raises the issue of the integrity of "voice" while discussing deaf culture and language. Focuses on deaf users of American Sign language and encourages examining whether an imperialistic attitude underlies society's expecting the deaf to learn a spoken language, such as English, even if the teaching is critical in orientation. (41 references)…

Investigated the effects of both pre-task and on-line planning on second language (L2) oral production. Results show that pre-task planning enhances grammatical complexity while on-line planning positively influences accuracy and grammatical complexity. Pre-task planners also produced more fluent and lexically varied language than the on-line…

Investigated the influence of nonverbal behavior in the context of interactive talk during the assessment of an oral proficiency interview test. Participants were Spanish- and Chinese-speaking international teaching assistants. Found interviewees who employed nonverbal behavior considered appropriate by North American evaluators and who negotiated…

Examines cooperative learning in relation to goals for second language (L2) development, first language (L1) maintenance, and content learning. Investigates how Chinese immigrant students perceive these goals and how they use the L1 and L2 to acquire content knowledge during cooperative learning activities. (Author/VWL)