Study of echoic memory interference among students in college introductory Spanish and German courses revealed that students with weaker listening comprehension skills depended more upon vulnerable sensory codes in echoic memory, while students with stronger comprehension relied on stable higher-order codes. (Author/CB)

The usefulness of bilingual dictionaries for vocabulary learning was examined with 293 Japanese university students studying English as a foreign language. Students who used a dictionary during reading scored significantly better on a vocabulary test than those who did not, but there was evidence for differential item functioning. (25 references)…

Native and experienced nonnatives listened to a text while performing a concurrent task. Half of each group was given the topic of the passage. Scores on the concurrent task were compared with baseline to index working memory (WM) consumption. Results showed greater WM consumption for nonnatives than natives when the topic was unavailable,…

Presents some of the general goals in story grammar research and examines its major issues. Then describes a study in which the effects of text content and order on narrative recall were investigated in intermediate and advanced readers of English as a foreign language. (SED)

Reports the results of an experiment which tested the ability of native English-speaking students of Spanish and native Spanish speakers to comprehend an oral passage, in Spanish, and remember the word order of certain sentences. The findings indicate that word order significantly affected the degree of the English speakers' comprehension.…

A native speaker-nonnative speaker conversational adjustment in the relative proportions of information type was examined for its relation to communicative success. Analyses indicated that an increase in the proportion of background detail correlated with comprehension problems for second-language learners. (22 references) (Author/VWL)

Recent advances in cross-language psycholinguistics provide reading researchers with both the models and the tools needed to investigate the syntactic processing of second-language (L2) readers. In this study, 48 first-language and 48 highly fluent L2 French readers read sentences containing constructions that do not exist in English, pre-verbal…

Investigated how well nonnative speakers (NNSs) could modify their output toward comprehensibility when interacting with native speakers (NSs) and NNSs, noting how often modified comprehensible output (MCO) was other- or self-initiated. Picture-dictation and opinion-exchange task data indicated that most repairs were self-initiated. NNS-NNS…

Advanced second language students' listening needs call for improvement in processing spoken discourse. Psychological data on memory span and linguistic discourse analysis findings are cited in support. A three-phase approach to listening instruction is proposed. (CHK)

Conducted experiment to determine how the presence of sandhi-variation, a common characteristic of spoken English that reduces the perceptual saliency of many of its features, affects the comprehensibility of English unit. Results indicated that sandhi-variation is an important input-intake filter for English learners but not for those whose…

Native English speakers' and foreign students' perceptions of 14 English intonation signals, recorded free of verbal context, show foreign students may be misinterpreting or missing much information communicated with nonlexical signals. (Author/MSE)

Analysis of the keyed responses of items in three English-as-a-Second-Language reading comprehension tests focused on the form and source of information and on the frequency with which the information appeared in the text. Analysis of the results found that these facets were differentially related to the item score at different proficiency levels.…

Reports on a two-phase study of second-language learner use of listener feedback, particularly their use of clarification questions in native speaker-nonnative speaker discourse. (29 references) (JL)

English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) learners in two countries participated in two parallel experiments testing whether retention of vocabulary acquired incidentally is contingent on amount of task-induced involvement. Results are discussed in light of the construct of task-induced involvement. (Author/VWL)

Research funded by a contract from the U.S. Office of Education to Rutgers University. (DS)