The social psychological constructs postulated by Garner, Clement et al. are integrated into a proposed new framework of second/foreign language (L2) learning motivation. The proposed model comprises three levels: language, learner, and learning situation. Practical examples for motivating L2 learners are presented. (55 references) (LB)

Didascalia, a Belgian research group, has developed Verbochip, a computer program dealing with the formation and contextual uses of English tenses, based on the principle of external versatility. The content base includes various fields with information that allows the content to be implemented in a selection system that fits the user's own…

Discusses new areas of investigation for causes of underachievement in black children, drawing on pertinent work in the United States, recent British research, and several personal accounts by black teachers. The article concludes by highlighting the role of black educators in multiethnic schools and points to their dual position in relation to…

Variations in the use of perfect "have" and its alternatives in the Trinidadian creole continuum are examined, based on data from a sample of speakers from different social backgrounds. The findings have implications for the study of morphosyntactic variation in other divergent dialect situations. (Contains 56 references.) (Author/LB)

An exploratory study of six undergraduates under laboratory conditions aimed to clarify the role of explicit teaching of different kinds of second-language grammar rules. In this look at methodology, one hypothesis was supported: that explicit and deductive learning is better than implicit for simple categorical rules. (Contains 24 references.)…

Reviews recent research on the application of sociocultural theory to second language (L2) acquisition, focusing on activity theory and the relevance of motives and goals for L2 learning, the role of private speech in L2 learning, and learning in the zone of proximal development. An annotated bibliography discusses 8 important works in the field.…

Looks at Europe-wide experiments on the role of Esperanto in facilitating language learning. (31 references) (Author)

Investigated the actionality effect in 48 French-speaking children (ages 5;0 to 7;11) by systematically varying the voice of the test sentences and the voice of the interpretive requests. The interaction between actionality, voice of sentence, and interpretive request revealed that the actionality effect depended on the type of task used to assess…

Cohesion analysis has been used to investigate the language of schizophrenics and that associated with other psychiatric syndromes. Cohesion, one means of creating text, cannot account for all aspects of the pretheoretical notion of coherence. As a research tool, cohesion meets the dual criteria of an analysis of language in context and…

Reviews published research on the question of whether recipients of utterances pay attention to gesture and whether they alter their understandings of utterances in light of this. Examines both experimental and observational studies. (51 references) (MDM)

Reviews research on the acquisition of second-language (L2) phonology, focusing on whether adult learners have access to the principles and parameters of Universal Grammar (UG). It argues that UG is still accessible in L2 phonological acquisition, and parameters can be reset but that the Subset Principle can impede learning success. (51…

Reviews research that supports the view that readers strip prefixed words of their prefix and lexically assess the words on the basis of their stem. An experiment using real and nonword stems found that nonwords that are considered to be stem morphemes are treated as being more wordlike than those that are not. (36 references) (MDM)

Two experiments assessed the performance of subjects on prefixed nonwords resulting from the incorrect combination of a prefix and a real word in Italian. The results support the view that prefixes may be represented as units of access or representation in the mental lexicon. (41 references) (MDM)

Presents a quantitative study of children's noun plural overregularizations on recent comparisons of connectionist and symbolic models of language. The speech of 10 English-speaking children aged 1;3 to 5;2 were analyzed. Results pose challenges to connectionist models, but are consistent with the blocking-and-retrieval-failure model in which…

Syntagmatic relationships receive less attention than paradigmatic relationships in the development and study of index languages. Exposes misperceptions in linguistic characterization of syntagmatic relationships, and proposes the expansion to include conceptual syntagmatic relationships (CSRs), and characterizes CSRs to determine their role in…