Reports an experimental study on the acquisition of English reflexives by adult Japanese-speaking learners of English. Consonant with a review of previous studies on binding in second-language acquisition, results of the experiment yield no evidence of an interlanguage grammar that is illicit with respect to universal grammar. (Author/ER)

Reports on a patient of Japanese background with suspected dementia in an English-speaking geriatric unit. The subject was tested in Japanese using tasks such as naming, story recall, and processing by semantic category. Results demonstrate the potential contribution of information from language-based tasks in the person's preferred language to…

Presents findings from the first phase of a longitudinal study examining the development of articulation quality and specific phoneme awareness during the fourth year of life. Articulation and phoneme awareness of /r/ and a control phoneme were assessed for 80 3-year-old children. (Author/JL)

In this longitudinal study, reading acquisition was related to phonological sensitivity and rapid naming in young children. Phonological assessment consisted of rhyme and initial consonant discrimination, whereas rapid naming tasks were made up of pictures, letters, and numbers. Subjects were 95 children from two grade levels, primary and grade…

Investigated how 30 tertiary English-as-a-Second-Language learners, at advanced and intermediate levels, engaged in a text reconstruction task. The study examined the types of grammatical items that caused the students most concern, and the reasoning they used to arrive at grammatical decisions. (Author/JL)

Examines the role of tasks in promoting intercultural learning in learning networks by looking at research from three e-mail projects between English as a foreign language (EFL) high school classes in Germany, and English and social studies classes in the United States and Canada. Joint reading of literary texts formed the basis for discussion on…

Examines the role of noticing in the second language writing process. A case study was conducted with two Mandarin background adult learners of English as a Second Language. The study documents the relationship of noticing, both in the composing stage and in the reformulation stage, to the improvement of the written product in the posttest of a…

Examines whether there is a strong relationship between second language learners' noticing of benefactive auxiliary verbs and their use in communication. Participants were university students who had acquired Japanese at home without receiving any formal instruction. Data were collected in face-to-face interviews, an interpretation task with 20…

In an increasing number of second language (L2) classrooms, teachers and researchers are taking on new roles and responsibilities. From these new perspectives, they are developing similar concerns about L2 learning processes, which they typically express in ways that reflect their different backgrounds and goals. To support learning, teaching, and…

The seminal work by Ericsson and Simon established verbal reports as a genuine way to get a glimpse into the "black box" of the workings of the human mind, and it is now recognised as a method of value in the pursuit of new knowledge relating to, for instance, learner strategies, cognitive strategies, human-computer interaction, and functionality…

In this paper the L2-Dutch of a group of adolescent Moroccans living in the Netherlands is studied. Four tasks were administered to these informants, to a number of Dutch peers, and to some of the mothers of the Moroccan informants. These tasks were designed to test if the informants were able to cope with complex sentences, such as sentences with…

Lip movements were examined across several repetitive speaking conditions (speech alone and speaking concurrently with a linguistic, cognitive, or visuomotor challenge task) in 20 young adults. Performance in these nonspeech activities was also compared between isolated tasks and concurrent speech conditions. Linguistic challenges resulted in…

How do in-house lobbyists for American colleges and universities compare with other types of lobbyists in their roles, tasks, and strategies? To answer this question 105 in-house lobbyists were surveyed using an instrument that reiterated key questions asked in earlier researchers' studies on private or special interest lobbyists, such as the gun…

Background: The Towers of London (TOL) and Hanoi (TOH) have been viewed as equivalent measures of planning and/or problem solving, although recent evidence in adults suggests that the underlying measurement characteristics of these two tasks may differ. As tower tasks are one of the few instruments that can be used to assess executive functioning…

On-line comprehension studies of flexible word-order languages find that noncanonical ("scrambled") structures induce more difficulty than canonical structures [e.g., Hyona & Hujanen, "Q. J. Exp. Psychol." 50A (1997) 841-858], with this difference being attributed to the structural complexity/infrequency of these forms. However, by presenting…