Nearly 40 years have passed since the publication of Rubin's renowned study on Paraguayan bilingualism. The present study compares the results of surveys conducted in the years 2000-2001 with data from Rubin's 1960-1961 investigation. The main objective of this study is to examine the linguistic changes that have occurred in four decades and the…

While decline and/or extinction threaten an ever-increasing number of languages, most of these are minority tongues that struggle for survival against dominant languages. The present paper reports the case of Belarusian, a national and co-official language, which the great majority of the population of Belarus considers as its mother tongue, but…

This paper reports our findings and observations on the difficulties of university students learning Greek as a foreign language at the University of Thessaly. A group of medical students, whose native language was Arabic, answered two questionnaires concerning their use of and competence in Greek. The results showed that first and second year…

We studied the correlation between response to fluvoxamine and serotonin transporter gene promoter region polymorphism (5-HTTLPR). Eighteen children with autistic disorder completed a 12-week double-blind, placebo-controlled, randomized crossover study of fluvoxamine. Behavioral assessments were obtained before and at 12 weeks of treatment.…

This study focuses on the use of electronic discussion boards with elementary-aged English as a Second Language (ESL) students. The purpose of the study is to investigate students' communicative competence in a computer-mediated communication environment. Both qualitative and quantitative methods were used to analyze 956 messages posted by 28 ESL…

Infants of 18 and 24 months acquiring English were tested in a preferential looking task on their ability to detect ungrammaticalities caused by manipulating a single function word in sentences. Infants heard grammatical sentences in which the determiner "the" preceded a target noun, as well as three ungrammatical conditions in which "the" was…

In 4 experiments, the authors addressed the mechanisms by which grammatical gender (in Italian and German) may come to affect meaning. In Experiments 1 (similarity judgments) and 2 (semantic substitution errors), the authors found Italian gender effects for animals but not for artifacts; Experiment 3 revealed no comparable effects in German. These…

This study investigated the reliability and validity of the Brief Acculturation Rating Scale for Mexican Americans-II (ARSMA-II) using two samples of Mexican American children: 292 middle school students from a mid-sized culturally diverse southwestern city, and 116 third- through fifth-graders in culturally homogeneous rural elementary schools.…

Through content analysis, employing qualitative and quantitative methods, Canadian media representation of people with cerebral palsy (PWCP) in public life was examined. Canadian NewsDisc, an online biographic database service, was used to examine the use of stigmatizing language such as afflicted by, afflicted with, suffered from, suffers from,…

This study investigates children's ability to use language to guide their choice of individuation criterion in the domains of objects and events. Previous work (Shipley, E. F., & Shepperson, B. (1990). Countable entities: developmental changes. "Cognition," 34, 109-136.) has shown that children have a strong bias to use a spatio-temporal…

This article examines speakers' perceptions of and attitudes towards address pronoun usage in Paris and Toulouse. The data on which this article is based come from a comparative project based at the University of Melbourne, "Address in some western European languages, and were generated in focus groups in both Paris and Toulouse, as well as…

When English language teachers from Russia join in professional discourse with their counterparts from other countries, they do so in English, using a professional register which is, to a large extent, determined by language teaching theorists and practitioners in Inner Circle countries. This paper examines some of the issues surrounding…

Teachers have a unique opportunity to influence education by the materials they select to use in their classrooms. However, many lack the research or life experience that is useful to teach about a living culture that is different from their own in an accurate, respectful manner. This article presents four categories to consider when selecting…

For the past 30 years, peace educators have drawn attention to the vital role of language--the caring, creative words that describe and enhance peace. The language of peace has evolved through several stages of growth and complexity. It also offers a heritage of caring and acceptance for all children who enter through educators' classroom doors.…

(Purpose) The purpose of this study was to investigate features of Japanese students' contact with the target language (English) outside the classroom in a study abroad context. (Methodology) The participants in this study were 29 Japanese students taking general English courses, for 12 weeks, at two private English language schools in New…