A study of subject-verb agreement in 3-year-old speakers of Brazilian Portuguese found an overall low error rate, but with important contrasts in both frequency of production of different verb inflections and rate of agreement errors associated with them, suggesting subject-verb agreement is acquired piecemeal and the learning of particular verb…

Discusses differences in academic discourse presentation, including preference for the use of first person singular "I" in some languages vs. the "we" perspective in others. Data are presented concerning employment of the two perspectives in English, German, French, Russian, and Bulgarian research articles in linguistics.…

Argues for a fundamental structural similarity between serial verb constructions, widely known from Kwa languages, and v-v compounds in Japanese. A major theoretical implication of the analysis is that it supports an analysis of clausal structure where the external argument is not included in the immediate projection of a verb but is introduced by…

Compares the ability of English speakers and Portuguese speakers to learn two complex rhythm patterns observed in languages with primary word stress. Subjects were familiarized with one of two rhythms during a discrimination task, followed by a recognition task that tested whether knowledge of the rhythm generalized to novel stimuli.(Author/VWL)

Examines the success of phonemic tone-marking for Dschang, a Grassfields Bantu language that uses tone to distinguish lexical items and some grammatical constructions. Participants from a variety of different age groups and educational backgrounds, and having different levels of exposure to the orthography, were tested on location in the Western…

Discusses the historical region of Istria, which is now divided between Italy, Slovenia, and for the largest part, Croatia, and where three national languages, Italian, Slovene, and Croatian function as standard varieties in the respective territories. Focuses on the role of Croatian in language planning and presents statistical data on language…

A teacher from Gallup, New Mexico provides an overview of and discusses the complex linguistic, cultural, and social issues that burden the lives of adolescents in the school district. (Author/VWL)

Investigates the relationship between language comprehension and language production in Swedish children in a study carried out longitudinally with 10 children with specific language impairment (SLI) and 10 children with unimpaired language development. Results indicate that the relationship between comprehension and production is different at…

Examined whether negotiated help provided within the learners' zone of proximal development (ZPD) is more effective than help provided randomly and irrespective of the learners' ZPD. Data were collected during tutorial sessions on writing English compositions by two Korean learners of English. Findings provide support for a consciousness raising…

Findings are reported from a series of literacy assessments in which four classes of bilingual Grade 3 and Grade 5 students from an indigenous community in Central Mexico participated. Subjects who completed the battery of tests of reading and writing in Spanish and Nahuatl range from balanced bilinguals to Spanish-dominant speakers with at least…

A Modern Language Association survey of enrollment trends in U.S. colleges found that Spanish, French, and German remain the three most popular language courses. Chinese, Japanese, and Arabic have shown greatest increases between 1960-95. The Less Commonly Taught Languages project provides information, including instructional materials and web…

To test whether cognitive processing in bilingual depends on script combinations and language proficiency, this study investigated the development of alphabetic and logographic visual search strategies in two kinds of biscriptals: (1) Malay-English and (2) Chinese-English readers. Results support the view that there are script implications of…

Using a questionnaire, this study examined Jordanian undergraduate students attitudes toward learning the Hebrew language. Results show that students express a neutral, guarded attitude toward Jewish language and culture. In general, the results indicate the importance of learning Hebrew and suggest that learning is intrinsically motivated.…

Argues that cross-morpheme and cross-word syllabification in the WEAVER model of speech production point to the need to deal with flexibility of syllable membership and pose difficulty to a memory-based approach but not to WEAVER. The study reviews empirical support for the form of syllabification in WEAVER and reports an experiment on…

Connectionist accounts of inflectional morphology have focused on domain of English past tense in which default process (add/ed) reflects process of suffixation adopted by majority of forms in the language. Arabic plural system is one where a minority default process operates. The study contrasts two types of default process that might lead to a…