Evidence from 3 experiments reveals interference effects from structural relationships that are inconsistent with any grammatical parse of the perceived input. Processing disruption was observed when items occurring between a head and a dependent overlapped with either (or both) syntactic or semantic features of the dependent. Effects of syntactic…

This study investigated the intelligibility of Chinese graduate students to their Indian, Chinese, Korean, and American peers. Specifically, the researcher sought to determine the teaching priorities for English for Academic Purposes in the US, where listeners have a wide variety of native languages. Research on Second Language Acquisition…

Lists, with examples, the rules for the pronunciation of the phonemes /x/ and /s/ in Spanish. (Text is in Spanish.) (DS)

Sixty fourth- and fifth-grade children listened to six series of six sentences each, with each sentence in a series containing the same artificial word. The task was to assign to the artificial word a meaning which would fit all sentence contexts in the series. Preliminary data provided an estimate of the probability that a particular sentence,…

If various color names are printed in various color inks, an observer has great difficulty in rapidly naming the ink colors (Stroop Color Word Test) unless the color names and the ink colors are mutually reinforcing, or the color names are unknown to the observer. The latter suggests a partial measure of second-language fluency, the feasibility of…

Discusses the strong contrastive analysis hypothesis, which claims predictive powers for contrastive analysis, and the weak hypothesis, which claims only that contrastive analysis can help account for observed difficulties in second language learning. The strong hypothesis is found untenable, and difficulties with the weak hypothesis are discussed…

A comprehensive procedure to test if bilinguals generalize semantically between their languages yielded results which support the classifying of bilinguals as either coordinate or compound. (FWB)

Results of a study designed to determine whether the activation of one of the bilingual's language systems makes the other system inoperative. (Author/FWB)

Examines socioculturally related interference phenomena by focusing on the English verbal behavior of the Japanese from a contrastive analysis approach. Discusses interactional patterns, speech acts, conversational strategies, and nonverbal behavior. (Author/BK)

Addresses the question of whether lexical selection is achieved by bilingual speakers during speech production. Specifically, tests whether there is competition between the two lexicons of a bilingual during lexical access. Two picture-word interference experiments explore the performance of two groups of bilinguals: English-Spanish, and…

We present data from four experiments using cross-modal priming to examine the effects of competitor environment on lexical activation during the time course of the perception of a spoken word. The research is conducted from the perspective of a distributed model of speech perception and lexical representation, which focuses on activation at the…

The negative effects of false information presented either prior to (proactive interference; PI) or following (retroactive interference; RI) true information was examined with word definitions (Experiment 1) and trivia facts (Experiment 2). Participants were explicitly aware of which information was true and false when shown, and true-false…

Although it is widely acknowledged that collocations play an important part in second language learning, especially at intermediate-advanced levels, learners' difficulties with collocations have not been investigated in much detail so far. The present study examines ESL learners' use of verb-noun collocations, such as "take notes," "place an…

Stroop interference is often taken as evidence for reading automaticity even though young and poor readers, who presumably lack reading automaticity, present strong interference. Here the relationship between reading skills and Stroop interference was studied in a 7th-grade sample. Greater interference was observed in children diagnosed with…