Found dissociations between regular and irregular inflectional processes in the formation of English past tenses, German noun plurals, and German participles. Children's inflectional errors include using regular patterns for irregular forms. Some linguistic processes, such as forming compound words, are sensitive to the distinction between regular…

Reviews five major findings of language research about the effect of explicit instruction and relates them to second-language teaching and learning, covering such areas as the route of acquisition, psycholinguistic readiness, error correction, classroom versus nonclassroom learning, and access to comprehensible and meaningful input. (37…

Yanggu, Anxiang, and Yuanyang diminutives and Cantonese familiar name formation are examined in the light of recent understanding about the role of prosodic categories in phonology and morphology. The results lend strong support to the growing body of research in prosodic morphology, especially the pioneering work of McCarthy and Prince. (52…

After setting definitions of pragmatics, prosody, and nonverbal communication, this paper reviews politeness theories and research in these fields, discussing their implications for teaching. It is posited that learners whose first language and native culture are more similar to the target language (TL) and culture are more likely to experience TL…

In conversations between bilinguals, each of whom is a learner of the other's language, two different local patterns of codeswitching may emerge: compliance and mutual convergence. It is argued that a pattern of compliance is ultimately more accommodating that convergence, contrary to the claims of Speech Accommodation Theory. (20 references)…

Previous research has been inconsistent in supporting any one model of idiom comprehension. This study found evidence of the effect of familiarity on reading times for sentences containing idioms, as well as new evidence that literalness affects reading times and that both familiarity and literalness exert interactive effects. (22 references)…

Addresses the issue of whether there exists a matrix language to a code-mixed (CM) sentence, or whether no feasible linguistic analysis can reliably assign a matrix language to a CM sentence. The examination draws on natural conversations involving Chinese-English CM in Singapore. (41 references) (GLR)

Connor comments on Raimes' research on the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) essay component, the Test of Written English (TWE), and the practices of the Educational Testing Service. Raimes' response is directed toward the TWE research agenda. (five references) (Author/LB)

Provides a contemporary Government-and-Binding reinterpretation and evaluation of Klima and Bellugi's 1966 work on the acquisition of interrogatives. It is argued that wh-questions in Child English involve a wh-pronoun positioned in the head complementizer position within the Complementizer Phrase (CP) and that children learn that wh-questions…

The assignment of primary stress to English words by a group of Arab speakers was studied by having the speakers pronounce both different types of words and validated nonsense words. Results indicate that newly concocted words may not be correctly pronounced by a significant number of subjects selected from the same populations. (18 references)…

Evaluates the use of oral translation as a second-language teaching activity. Shows that, with a proper regard for the principles of translation theory, translation can play a valuable role in second-language teaching and that translation should be an integral part of the language learning program. (HB)

In this study, phonological similarity neighborhood sizes were calculated for expressive lexicon derived from 2 vocabulary lists representative of children aged 1;3 to 3;0. Over 80% of the words in these early lexicons had at least one phonological neighbor; nearly 20% had six or more phonological neighbors. (Contains 29 references.)

Fourteen mothers and their children participated in a storybook reading session in which the mothers taught their children both a basic-level count noun and a situation-restricted count noun for a series of object drawings. Analysis of mothers' spontaneous teaching strategies revealed that they typically taught a basic-level count noun before a…

This paper illustrates the use of corpus-based analytical techniques to address a range of issues in applied linguistics. This approach provides large databases of naturally occurring discourse, enabling empirical analyses of the actual patterns of use in a language and, when coupled with automatic computational tools, enables analyses of a scope…

A model of language vitality is proposed that is a function of preferences for language choice, percentage of language-minority speakers, and the expectations-based adjustment to the observed change in language vitality. It shows that long-term survival with low demolinguistic figures is possible and suggests policy guidelines for reversing…