Investigates whether conceptualizable agents in the discourse play a role in English second language overpassivization errors. Hypothesizes that learners are more likely to make overpassivization errors in externally caused events than in internally caused events. Subjects were Chinese learners of English. (Author/VWL)

Argues that significant improvement in high school students' spelling can result from direct diagnostic teaching that helps disabled spellers analyze and overcome their problems. Presents a cognitively based error-analysis protocol which has the promise for providing the insights needed to enhance the effectiveness of spelling instruction for…

Summarizes research in perception dealing with error detection as it pertains to proofreading skills in communication. Focuses on several causes for the lack of perceptual proficiency in error detection, including feature redundancy, context, and phonological encoding. Notes that these causes may interrelate to form a Gestalt response to error…

Provides a historical overview of the role of Contrastive Analysis (CA) in second-language teaching and discusses Di Pietro's steadfast support of CA. The article concludes with the importance of Di Pietro's notion of strategic interaction, part of his rich legacy to linguistics. (CFM)

Second language researchers have been studying passive unaccusative errors such as "What was happened?," but have not reached a consensus about the ultimate cause of this unique interlanguage structure. This article reviews five major accounts proposed in he literature. (Author/VWL)

Fifty-seven children (ages 5-8) with and without specific language impairment (SLI) participated in judgment and elicitation tasks designed to evaluate their understanding of irregular verb forms. Differences between SLI and control children were observed in their productions and relative levels of sensitivity to infinitive errors in finite…

Determines the pattern of errors in Spanish spelling. Analyzes and proposes a classification system for the errors made by children in the initial stages of the acquisition of spelling skills. Finds the diverse forms of only 20 Spanish words produces 36% of the spelling errors in Spanish; and substitution is the most frequent type of error. (RS)

Investigates the role of different linguistic levels in beginning readers' oral reading as the first step in a longitudinal investigation of Swedish beginning readers' reading behavior. Reveals that the readers are sensitive to all of the linguistic levels analyzed: the majority of reading errors lead to acceptable linguistic consequences,…

Models of speech production differ on whether phonological neighbourhoods should affect processing, and on whether effects should be facilitatory or inhibitory. Inhibitory effects of large neighbourhoods have been argued to underlie apparent anti-frequency effects, whereby high-frequency default features are more prone to mispronunciation errors…

The dominant viewpoint regarding phonologically driven speech errors is that segments are the units responsible behind the errors. The goal of this paper is to illustrate the point that other potential candidates for explaining these speech errors, which have gone largely unnoticed, provide a better explanatory framework for speech errors than do…

Construct validity concerns for the IPT I Oral Grades K-6 Spanish Second Edition (IPT-S) as a measure of native oral language proficiency are examined. The examination included describing a subset of items that contributes most to overall score and native-language proficiency designation. Correlations between this subset of items and the overall…

Most research on language awareness in a second language (L2) has been carried out with adult learners. This research presents data showing that pedagogical techniques can be devised enabling children as young as 8 to develop metalinguistic awareness of their emerging L2 system. Building on existing work by Canadian researchers, this…

We investigate whether children with Grammatical Specific Language Impairment (G-SLI) are also phonologically impaired and, if so, what the nature of that impairment is. We focus on the prosodic complexity of words, based on their syllabic and metrical (stress) structure, and investigate this using a novel non-word repetition procedure, the Test…

This longitudinal case study investigated the development of spelling and orthographic knowledge in a child ESL learner from Grade 1 through Grade 4. Misspelling data from the learner's free writings were examined for overall patterns of spelling development and the word-specific changes in the spelling of individual words. The aim was to track…

As part of a growing effort to understand the organization of repair across languages, this study examines 2 repeat-formatted other-initiated repair practices in Mandarin conversation. Using the methodology of conversation analysis as a central framework, this study shows that the 2 Mandarin repair initiations under examination, like…