Diglossia, or the use of two forms of a language in a single speech community, is widespread. Differences between the nonstandard form, used for everyday conversations, and the standard form, used for formal occasions and writing, often extend to phonology as well as grammar and vocabulary. Most preschoolers from diglossic families are routinely…

There is considerable evidence from psycholinguistics that first language listeners handle function words differently from content words. This makes intuitive sense because content words require the listener to access a lexical meaning representation whereas function words do not. A separate channel of processing for functors would enable them to…

French gender marking errors made by 23 Anglophones and 20 Lusophones are analyzed. The observation is made that the errors noted are due to frequent arbitrariness of this particular aspect of the language. It is concluded that the arbitrary portions of this feature of the language are subject to remaining indeterminate in second language…

Intended to provide a knowledge base for intervention and remediation, this report summarizes what is currently known about patterns of children's reading and spelling substitution errors, with an emphasis on specific examples of the kinds of mistakes actually made by students. Following an introduction, preface, and preparatory quotes, the report…

Preposition usage by students at a secondary school for the deaf was examined in Ss' response to a videotape showing a young woman using Signed English with a voiceover. A descriptive essay was collected in response to a question she posed. Essays were typed verbatim into computer storage and then coded for grammatical features using a multiple…

Summarizes the usefulness and the disadvantage of error analysis, and discusses a reorientation of error analysis, specifically regarding grammar instruction and the significance of errors. (Text is in French.) (AM)

Reviews research regarding the role of correction feedback in second-language acquisition, exploring why, what, and how language should be corrected and who should correct language. (Author/CB)

The study showed that both word analysis and word-supply error correction procedures greatly reduced the number of oral reading errors of four moderately mentally retarded students (12-17 years old). The word-analysis method, however, was significantly more effective than word supply. (Author/CL)

Discusses a study of attitudes of U.S. bilingual and Spanish-speaking learners of English toward native and non-native speech samples. Demonstrates that error hierarchies (the ranking of errors by comprehensibility, irritation, or other criteria) based on language attitudes are tentatively valid with reference to very low language ability. (SED)

College students' subjective evaluations of newspaper articles became increasingly negative as errors of logic, word use, and omission increased. (FL)

A corpus of the author's own slips of the pen is analyzed. Four processing levels--lexical, graphemic, allographic, and graphic--are postulated, with different types of error being assigned to different levels in the production of handwriting. (Author)

Examined whether there was negative evidence in adult reformulations of erroneous child utterances, and if so, whether children made use of that evidence. Findings show that adults reformulate erroneous utterances often enough for learning to occur. Children can detect differences between their own utterance and the adult reformulation and make…

A systemic model for a semantico-grammatical approach to language teaching is presented along with an illustration of its usefulness in finding underdeveloped parts of the semantico-grammatical system and a description of a successful preliminary trial in treating them. (18 references) (VWL)

Presents an analysis of 907 slips from 32 children, ages 1;4-6;0, collected in naturalistic settings. The children's data are compared to that of adults, each other, and where appropriate, analyzed in terms of developments through the age range. It is found that children make most of the same type and proportions of slips as adults. (26…

Reports on a case study where an individual's errors in productive tasks are analyzable as functions of morphological properties of the target and/or the response. It is shown that the morphological errors are explainable in the context of a two-stage retrieval system applying to both affixed and unaffixed words. (33 references) (JL)