Three- and four-year-old children were asked to perform a judgement task in which they chose between incorrect English transitives and intransitives and their correct adult equivalents. Purely semantic or syntactic models fail to explain the findings as well as does a model based on semantic/syntactic transitivity. (SED)

Reports a study of the written English of native Arab learners which investigated: (1) the extent to which judgments of intelligibility and naturalness differed; (2) the extent to which error type and linguistic context affected the intelligibility, naturalness and interpretability of devian utterances; and (3) the basis for native speakers;…

Children in preschool, first, and third grades heard similar versions of an unfamiliar script-like story followed by a novel story, then were tested for immediate and delayed recall. Children more often confused parts of the similar stories with each other than with the novel story; in addition, preschoolers showed less evidence of constructive…

Suggests the use of "Error Cards"--cards which contain instruction regarding the deliberate making of a particular language error--as a good means of peer teaching practice during the training of English as a foreign language teachers. In addition, suggestions are made for the extension of this technique beyond the given example. (SL)

Coding of printed letters in a task of consonant recall was examined in relation to the level of success of prelingually and profoundly deaf young children. Results indicated that the success of good readers appears to be related to their ability to establish and make use of linguistically recoded representations of the language. (Author/CI)

Examines the implications of the ACTFL Provisional Proficiency Guidelines for the writing curriculum. Argues that the functions identified in the guidelines should be practices in writing as well as in speech. Discusses error correction techniques and presents examples of writing assignments in Russian that elicit advanced-level functions. (SED)

Describes an investigation of the notion that sentence perception involves holding single clauses or propositions in a temporary buffer. Concludes that this notion is false and that, instead, more recently presented or important material may become more accessible in memory as presentation of the sentence proceeds. (Author/SED)

Reports on a study that investigated the perception in deaf children, aged 6 to 10, of American Sign Language signs that differ in only one major parameter to determine whether any of the three parameters (handshape, movement, and location) is more difficult than others for deaf children to discriminate. (SED)

Reviews the results of research in language acquisition, interactional analysis, pragmatics, repair, error, and social and affective factors. Extracts four language teaching principles relating to acquisition activities in the classroom, the importance of affective factors, the communicative capacity of learners, and the nature and treatment of…

The study of speech errors, or "slips of the tongue," is a time-honored methodology which serves as a window to the representation and processing of language and has proven to be the most reliable source of data for building theories of speech production planning. However, until "Kids' Slips," there has never been a corpus of such errors from…

This study investigated Taiwanese English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students knowledge of English collocations and the collocational errors they made. The subjects were 60 students from a college in Taiwan. The research instrument was a self-designed Simple Completion Test that measured students knowledge of four types of lexical collocations:…

In analyzing the errors made in a French grammar test by intermediate level English-speaking learners of the language, it was found that not all mistakes could be accounted for by interference from the native language, but that other psychological factors were involved as well. (FB)

Areas of contradiction and controversy over error analysis are discussed, and an interference error analysis project is described, giving a detailed definition of interference error. Several practical approaches to teaching out interference errors are outlined. (MSE)

Discusses student communication in a second language in terms of comprehensibility, irritation, acceptability, communicative strategies, the personality of the second-language speaker, and the differences in perception of the communication by native speakers and nonnative speakers, who are teachers of the language. Recommendations for classroom…

Discusses the influence a first language can have on the acquisition of a second language. Includes some tentative proposals on the interaction of prior first-language knowledge and the creative construction process. (EKN)