An examination of different types of hesitation in the speech of learners of French as a foreign language reveals several times as much hesitation as native speakers experience, with slowed speech apparent in the speech of foreign language learners. (MSE)

Examined the oral performance of midcourse and endcourse adult American learners of Russian to determine the accuracy order of Russian cases and demonstrated an order of accuracy common to both groups. According to decreasing accuracy, the Russian cases cluster in three rank orders: (1) prepositional and accusative; (2) genitive and instrumental;…

Offers an analysis of written and oral texts and a questionnaire on the contemporary use of future and conditional modals in French, and reviews the treatment of these verb forms by grammarians and language learning authors. Findings suggest that grammar books and manuals offer guidance on the written use of the modals, rather than the oral usage.…

Reviews four books on speech research: (1) "The Speech Chain: The Physics and Biology of Spoken Language" (Peter B. Denes and Elliot N. Pinson); (2) "Speaking: From Intention to Articulation" (Willem J. M. Levelt); (3) "Talking to Learn: Conversation in Second Language Acquisition" (Richard R. Day); and (4) "Speaking" (Martin Bygate). (eight…

This article argues that consideration by teachers of spoken English shows that learners need to be given choices between written and spoken grammars, that the interpersonal implications of spoken grammars are important, and that methodologically inductive learning may be more appropriate than the presentation-practice-production approaches…

The development, implementation, and evaluation of a semidirect test of oral proficiency, the Rhetorical Task Examination (RTE), is reported. The RTE proposes a compromise approach to rating oral skills by having two scales: one for the functional ability for accomplishing rhetorical tasks and one for linguistic competence. (34 references)…

This study examines the distribution of nouns and verbs in maternal speech to one year olds. Mothers and children were videotaped. Nouns and verbs in maternal speech were coded for frequency, sentence position, and occurrence with grammatical inflections. Frequency of nouns and verbs varied with context. (33 references) (KM)

Reviews research that sheds light on the comparability of Oral Proficiency Interview and the Simulated Oral Proficiency Interview. Suggestions are provided for further research. (16 references) (VWL)

Examination of two sections of Benedetto Varchi's sixteenth-century document on Italian language usage reveals an uncommon appreciation for living usage, recognition of common linguistic practice, and a significantly greater awareness of social differentiation than that typically reflected in other sixteenth-century manuscripts. (31 references)…

Tests competing hypotheses concerning the source of cross-linguistic communication difficulty. Subjects rated four versions of Chinese-produced English discourse for comprehensibility. Results indicated that the effect of discourse miscues on comprehensibility was highly significant, whereas there was no significant effect for order of ideas. (45…

Describes the acquisition and use of a Chinese metalanguage with which ambiguous spoken words are graphically contextualized. The metalanguage is composed of strategies that range from the actual writing of the Chinese graph (character) to those where the graph is accommodated in a verbal presentation. (12 references) (JL)

Examines cognates (lexical items from different languages that are identified by bilinguals as being the same thing), arguing that the Cohort Model effectively explains cognate properties and that cognates should be defined in terms of their structural representations and the processes that activate and select them. (79 references) (Author/CB)

Examination of oral proficiency interview discourse suggests that the extent of interviewer accommodation is an overlooked criterion for gauging the authenticity of the interview as simulated conversational interaction and that misplaced accommodation could threaten interview validity and the rating process. (61 references) (Author/CB)

Demonstrates that in spoken discourse many clauses introduced by "subordinating conjunctions" are actually neither structurally nor informationally subordinate. Suggests that the study of linguistic complexity must include spoken as well as written discourse and take account of cultural and situational language contexts. (SR)

Provides an acoustic profile of the prosody of right-dislocations in French, using the CECIL computer hardware and software package to analyze 28 right-dislocations occurring in a corpus of natural French discourse. It was found that, although right-dislocations appear to fulfill various functional roles in discourse, no correlation appears…