Examines the changes that occur from ages 5 to 11 in question/answer sequences of Dutch children. Function, content, form of questions, and listener response are analyzed. (EKN)

The linguistic complexity of grammatical structures depends on their usage. Such complexity must be purposefully controlled by the teacher of English as a second language. Examples of shortcomings in the presentation of various structures in current textbooks illustrate this point. (PMJ)

Monolingual Hebrew-speaking subjects aged 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 11 years, as well as college students, were asked to interpret utterances consisting of two nouns and a verb in order to determine whether Hebrew speakers can rely on a word order strategy to assign sentence relation. (MP)

Discusses why Japanese students frequently passivize certain intransitive English verbs. It is suggested that students might make this error because they associate adversity with the passive construction and use passives whenever adversity is implied. Discussion of other expressions implying adversity and implications for both applied and…

Compares BASIC and LOGO systems in developing artificial intelligence systems. Provides listings of programs used for translating and sentence making. Describes methodology and compares the BASIC and LOGO programs. (MVL)

Contends that computer-aided literature studies have failed to impact the field as a whole. Asserts that new databases, such as TLG or ARTFL, allow wide-spectrum analyses that may transform the way in which literature is studied. (CFR)

Li's work, which expands the government binding (GB) literature on Chinese linguistics and contributes to understanding constituency and word order, is described. Important issues are noted, empirical or theory-neutral criticisms of Li's accounts are raised, and alternative solutions are offered. (21 references) (LB)

Ideas for French-language classroom activities include an exercise in understanding and expressing location; an imaginary shopping excursion; an etymological and vocabulary development exercise; and use of brief films to improve comprehension and expression of opinions. (MSE)

Investigates the cause of avoidance in learning negation in a Korean as a second-language (KSL) situation. Because Korean has two types of negatives--preverbal and postverbal--examination focused on whether students of KSL avoid a certain negative form, and if so, why. (Author/VWL)

Investigated the acquisition of base-generated topics in Mandarin Chinese by British students learning Chinese. The hypothesis is not confirmed that it would not be difficult for English speakers to acquire the base-generated topic in Chinese because in the acquisition of Chinese, English-speaking learners are exposed to positive evidence of…

Describes the application of the Instruction Parsed Corpus as data in the Word Class Drills version 1.0 (WCD v1.0), a simple CALL program teaching word classes or grammatical parts of speech. The WCD v1.0 provides two modes of language learning activities, "viz.", the learning mode and the testing mode. (three references) (Author/CK)

Investigates the contribution of markedness and learning principles to second language (L2)acquisition. Korean language learners of English completed a written sentence-combining task and a written grammaticality judgment task. Results show subjects acquire English relative clauses in the same order and suggests that L2 learners have dual access…

A study investigated the importance of sentence topic in written discourse. Training second language writers to identify sentence topics in drafts of their written work has been proposed as a central means of helping writers achieve greater coherence. The study explored the notion that "topic" is a psychological rather than linguistic concept, and…

To estimate reading difficulty of items on a sentence repetition task, a study had 50 adult English as a second language (ESL) students repeat each of 26 sentences immediately after two presentations. High-difficulty items were derivationally more complex than low-difficulty items, and the most difficult items involved the processing of…

The performance of native and nonnative Hindi-Urdu speaking children (N=131) and adults (N=30) in the comprehension of the Hindi-Urdu correlative constructions was analyzed. Results indicated that Hindi-Urdu correlative constructs are acquired relatively late by both native and nonnative speakers, suggesting that language universals are available…