Investigation of native Chinese speakers' acquisition of French suprasegmental features found that the subjects not only perceived the different directions of pitch but also placed them in the right categories, in spite of the differences between the use of pitch in tonal and intonational languages. (34 references) (CB)

Examined the development of Irish word order patterns. It was found that the 1.5- to 3-year-olds (N=3) studied used subject-initial utterances more frequently than adults in input, and that for both adults and children the elision of the verb "to be" had a significant role in the placement of subjects in the utterances. (42 references)…

A survey of 52 college students in the Sanbalpur District of Orissa (India) determined that they had favorable attitudes toward English. Students preferred English to Hindi as a link language with Oriya, and favored a two-language instead of a three-language formula in language study. (Author/LMO)

An exploratory application of the "acquisitional strategies" framework investigated English-speaking language learners' acquisition of preposition stranding in Dutch. Interesting syntactic and morphological contrasts in both English and Dutch render the framework a valuable empirical tool for evaluating language acquisition strategies. (Author/CB)

Translations of three Arabic texts into English illustrate the differences between the aural and visual modes of text development. An analysis of the function of these modes in their social contexts explains the problems of the negative transfer of habits from one language to another. (Author/CB)

A study of Hebrew poems for children revealed elements of the historical and sociolinguistic dilemmas encountered in the revival of spoken Hebrew, including conflicts concerning usage and change. (MSE)

Explores "political diglossia" in contemporary Poland, the unofficial, underground language of antipropaganda that arose in reaction to state propaganda. Colloquial and official designations for police and security forces are compared, and the semantics of relevant words and expressions are studied. Language is shown to reflect social…

Longitudinal observation of one- to three-year-olds' (N=2) acquisition of complement phrasal construction in Korean found that, in spite of typological differences between English and Korean, both syntactic and semantic characteristics were shared by children acquiring complement structure in the two languages. (Author/CB)

Examination of the effects of transferred vocabulary knowledge on college students' (N=24) acquisition of Japanese linguistic knowledge, verbal processing skills, and reading comprehension indicated that vocabulary knowledge was most highly correlated with reading comprehension. This initial advantage magnified its effects over time as task…

A contrastive analysis of Edo (Bini) and English reveals problems that Edo first language speakers may encounter in learning English-as-a-Second-Language, and identifies the potential problem areas: 1) the consonant system; 2) allophones and their distribution; 3) syllable structure; and 4) suprasegmental features. (Author/VWL)

Provides a number of reading techniques and activities to demonstrate the feasibility of using real foreign language texts at the earliest stages of a beginning course. Examples in Dutch, Italian, Greek, Russian, Somali, and Japanese show how real texts in any language can be presented to beginners. (Author/LMO)

Investigation of the relationship between attitudes, second language proficiency, and "cultural distance" in 170 foreign students at a Norwegian university showed that cultural distance significantly influenced subjects' attitudes toward Norwegians, fellow countrymen, and an ideal person. There was no positive relationship between grades and…

Discusses the major directions taken by Sri Lankan English fiction in the 1980's in developing style ranges appropriate for the expression of new social realities. Four works of fiction are used to illustrate progress towards this goal. (42 references) (Author/OD)

The hispanicization of Mayan immigrants in Los Angeles is explored, focusing on the patterns of usage of Mayan, Spanish, and English among men, women, and children, and the trend toward Spanish-English bilingualism. (Author/MSE)

A study using 288 Japanese university level English-as-a-Foreign-Language students examined native language transfer, specifically the lexical transfer occurring in responses to yes-no questions. An analysis of answer patterns and statistical tables is included. (OD)