Misspellings evidenced by 69 3rd graders in a battery containing 25 words and 20 nonsense syllable items were analyzed phonologically. Children with histories of disordered phonologies (n=29) showed more phonologically based deviations in their misspellings, relied more on less productive spelling strategies, and showed poorer phonological…

Tested comprehension of syntactic structures by presenting each structure with both plausible and implausible content. Results revealed that cognitive nonlinguistic factors were important for comprehension and that errors and reaction time increased with age. The minimal contribution of neuropsychological factors to this decline suggests that the…

Examination of native Chinese Mandarin speakers' identification of monosyllables that included oral and nasal stops representing English/Mandarin contrasts and noncontrasts in syllable-initial/-final positions found that the presence of nasal as opposed to oral stop consonants in the syllables appeared to be the most significant factor affecting…

Examines the use of English by merchandisers in Macao, where the required proficiency exceeds that these individuals can be expected to possess. Examples of serious language mistakes are given and contextual and other clues are identified. Possible solutions for these problems are suggested and potential directions of further enquiry are explored.…

This response to Fey (EC 604 058) discusses the use of the term "phonological" to describe disordered speech patterns and suggests that phonological disorders include both phonetic and phonemic error types. Describing errors as either phonetic or phonemic is seen to lead to differential treatment procedures. (Author/DB)

Twelve secondary students with learning disabilities read aloud from a text after previewing the passage under one of three conditions. Results showed significant decreases in error rates under slow-rate listening previewing and silent previewing and showed that slow-rate listening previewing resulted in fewer errors per minute than did fast-rate…

Most analyses of linguistic errors set up unidimensional categories of grammatical, lexical, and semantic deviations. A two-dimensional classification system is described that formed the basis of a study of phenomena of foreign-language interaction. Thirteen classes of linguistic deviation emerged in the study. (Contains 37 references.) (Author/LB)

This study compared picture-naming ability of 66 children (ages 4:3 to 9:7), half with expressive-only language deficits (SLI-exp) and half with receptive and expressive language (SLI-mix) deficits, with 66 children with no language impairment.Specific language impairment (SLI) children made more errors than controls and SLI-exp children made more…

Considers two different views of beginning reading, one emphasizing the alphabetic nature of written language and the other focusing on contextual, as opposed to graphic, information. Examines different perspectives by evaluating oral reading errors in 15 first graders. Results support the influence of instructional approach on children's…

Notes that prior assumptions that writing requires phonological mediation has been questioned due to the observation that on tasks requiring the production of spoken and written responses on the same naming attempt, some aphasic subjects produce different words. The data suggest that phonological and orthographic word forms can interact. (53…

The traditional view of the lexical system stipulates word-specific representations and separate pathways for regular and exception words, while an alternative approach views lexical knowledge as developing from general principles applied to mappings among distributed representations of written and spoken words and their meanings. In this study,…

Discusses the experience, results, and prognoses for the development and implemenation of grammar-checking programs that can advise effectively on language produced by learners of English-as-a-Foreign-Language. Particular focus is on work that has been carried out at University of Exeter over the last 10 years, specifically on two programs,…

It has been known for several decades that young children have difficulties with universal sentences. In this article, I present an analysis of the main errors that have been reported in the literature. My proposal is based on an old idea, namely, that children's errors are caused by a noncanonical mapping from syntactic form to semantic…

This article presents evidence of syntactic transfer from Chinese to English based on data obtained from 710 Hong Kong Chinese ESL learners at different proficiency levels. Three methodologies were used: self-reporting in individual interviews, translation (with and without prompts), and grammaticality judgment. The focus of the study was on 5…

Between the ages of 3 and 7 years, children have been observed to produce verb argument structure overgeneralization errors (e.g., Don't giggle me; Bowerman, 1982, 1988; Pinker, 1989). A number of recent studies have begun to find evidence that the precise distributional properties of the input may provide an important part of the explanation for…