Examines growth of word reading skills in first- and second-grade Italian children by analyzing the pattern of reading errors. Tailors the selection of reading material to permit a meaningful cross-language comparison with pre-existing findings on English-speaking children. Finds that, in English and Italian, spatially related errors constituted a…

Discusses various theories of spelling development including their relevance to regularly spelled languages. Concludes that, as in other languages, children are integrating many different types of linguistic knowledge in their attempt to spell words correctly; dialect, orthography, and grammatical knowledge are all important. (SG)

Conducts a small-scale survey similar to one conducted by Maxine Hairston in 1979 to test whether nonacademic professionals' attitudes towards usage errors have changed in 20 years. Indicates a trend for respondents to find errors less bothersome than the respondents did 20 years ago. Supports the claim made by Hairston and other researchers that…

Four grammar checkers, all of French Canadian origin, were evaluated: "Le Correcteur 101,""GramR,""Hugo Plus," and "French Proofing Tools." Results indicate that "Le Correcteur 101" is the best French grammar checker on the market and worth its premium cost. (two references) (CK)

This study of 40 hearing-impaired college students found that highly intelligible speakers were uniformly consistent in their speech production patterns, whereas speakers who exhibited low overall speech intelligibility were either extremely consistent in their aberrant production patterns or extremely inconsistent in their error patterns.…

Ten language-impaired children, aged 4-6, were found to exhibit more pronounced syntactic deficits than 10 normal children matched by mean length of utterance. Language samples were analyzed with respect to: grammatical marker need index; grammatical marker error index; and grammatical marker errors for nouns, verbs, bound, and unbound forms.…

This paper discusses the validity and utility of contrastive analysis for language teaching, focusing on the utility of contrastive analysis over error analysis in analyzing adverbial positioning in sentences produced by two groups of native speakers of English and Arabic. Contains 13 references. (MDM)

Investigation of the accuracy of novice learners of British Sign Language (BSL) and sign-naive subjects in recognizing possible and impossible BSL signs and in naming signs suggests that rated iconicity and the ability to process potentially meaningful gestures, determined recognition and naming accuracy. (19 references) (Author/CB)

Phonetic characteristics of English spoken by Japanese university students were analyzed and classified, and the degree of intelligibility of nonnative speech presented to native English speakers was measured. It was found that the degree of intelligibility was closely related to the level of context presented. (33 references) (JL)

This study, involving 32 adult speakers of Dutch, strengthens the covert repair hypothesis of disfluency. It found that emphasis on speech accuracy causes lower speech error rates but does not affect disfluency and self-repair rates, noise masking reduces disfluency and self-repair rates but does not affect speech error numbers, and internal…

Caution should be taken in viewing previous research indicating that negative evidence, a special type of error correction to eliminate overgeneralizations, could be crucial to second-language learning, because the underlying theories adopted for that research possibly could be flawed. (10 references) (CB)

Discusses a study that attempted to create and test the validity of an error analysis model usable by high school teachers. Results indicate that, in themes that do not contain significant mechanical errors, syntactical errors do not lead to a breakdown of meaning. Numerous syntactical errors, however, do create comprehension problems. (15…

Represents an attempt to define the seriousness of errors by computerized tabulation and in a limited context, because no reliable accounting of general attitudes toward errors exists. (MG)

The Colorado Process Analysis of the Written Language of Hearing-Impaired Children assesses the semantic characteristics of expressive written language narratives prepared by beginning writers. The validity of the instrument was examined with 284 children (ages 7-21), indicating that the model does identify characteristics that are critical to the…

This paper discusses the speech monitoring process that underlies overt self-repairing of speech errors; the covert repair hypothesis, dealing particularly with explaining the variety of disfluency types from a restricted set of repair principles; quantitative and qualitative characteristics of disfluency in people who stutter; and the covert…