Presents the results of an analysis of the acquisition of fricatives in 5 English children between the ages of 24 and 49 months. After giving an overview of the area of articulatory phonetics and citing previous research, data collection, scoring problems, and error analysis are discussed. (CFM)

Examination of parental responses to their young children's (N=3) inflectional over-regularizations and wh-question auxiliary-verb omission errors suggested that two of the children's parents followed ill-formed utterances with expansions and clarification questions. Such corrective responses dropped out of children's input as they continued to…

Analysis of speech samples from four-year-old monozygotic and dizygotic twins revealed that the monozygotic twins were significantly more likely to misproduce the same sound on an articulation test than were dizygotic twins. The dizygotic twins were no more likely to share errors than were children who were both genetically and environmentally…

Explores essay writing problems common to intermediate and advanced English-as-a-second-language students and suggests such remedies as pre-writing exercises and post-writing analysis to help students overcome these problems. (Author/CB)

Describes the authors' error-frequency research, relating how they collected 19,615 teacher-marked student papers from the 1980s, analyzed them, and determined the major patterns of formal and mechanical error in current student writing. (SR)

Focuses on concepts and arguments from psychoanalysis and presents an example of a counterargument on the slip of the tongue. The article delineates psycholinguistic accounts of speech errors, showing how these accounts can enhance a comparison of three samples of literary and nonliterary word substitutions that elucidate claims being made in…

Experienced deaf-blind users (N=10) of sign language tested their ability to receive signed messages including isolated signs and sentences. A set of 122 isolated signs was received with an average accuracy of 87%. Signed sentence reception accuracy ranged from 60-85%, with errors accounted for primarily by deletions and phonological or…

Addresses the difficulty of article acquisition by examining the perception of noun countability by native speakers of English and Japanese speakers of English, testing whether native and nonnative speakers have different perceptions of countability. Results suggest a possible link between the indefinite versus zero article suppliance by Japanese…

Spontaneous speech samples from 10 Swedish children were analyzed grammatically. The five subjects (age five) with specific language impairment (SLI) differed from controls in their more restricted usage of word order patterns and number of grammatical errors. Their speech also showed frequent omissions of grammatical morphemes. Results suggest…

Untrained native English listeners assigned foreign accent scores to sentence and narrative utterances produced by native English speakers and Mandarin-speaking learners of English, rendered unintelligible through low-pass filtering. Because the filtered speech stimuli contained little of what could be considered segmental information, results…

Offers sufficient responses to 60 of the most frequently made errors in German grammar, plus 13 punctuation rules, and proposes that the instructor hand out this list to the students and henceforth "tag" language errors by the corresponding number, then have the student correct them and resubmit the assignment for a better grade. (GLR)

This study investigated developmental patterns of acquisition of the unrounded U.S. English vowels, by following 6 normally developing children from 22 to 30 months of age. Three classes of production errors were identified: intertrial production variability, context-sensitive substitutions, and context-free systematic substitution patterns.…

It is shown that many students' errors in second-language learning are based on conclusions that they are drawing from faulty and incomplete information in textbooks, whereas other "errors" are the result of normal language learning strategies and occur in systematic patterns. (LB)

The assessment of foreign students' writing by native speaker English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) teachers was examined using an analytical scoring technique based on the "ESL Composition Profile." Results showed that vocabulary accounted for the largest among of variance in total scores, followed by content, language use, organization, and…

This study attempted to quantify diagnostic characteristics related to consonant production of developmental verbal dyspraxia (DVD) in 11 Dutch children (ages 6 and 7). The study was able to quantify diagnostic characteristics but found very few qualitative differences in error patterns between children with DVD and 11 age-matched children with…