Examination of native Chinese Mandarin speakers' identification of monosyllables that included oral and nasal stops representing English/Mandarin contrasts and noncontrasts in syllable-initial/-final positions found that the presence of nasal as opposed to oral stop consonants in the syllables appeared to be the most significant factor affecting…

Native Speakers of English and Dutch teachers of English judged the English pronunciation of two Dutchmen, resulting in a fairly large area of consensus. In a second experiment, native English speakers and Dutch speakers of English judged the English pronunciation of both experienced and inexperienced Dutch speakers of English. (15 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,…

This study investigates the avoidance of English phrasal verbs by Chinese learners. Six groups of Chinese learners (intermediate and advanced; a total of 70) took one of 3 tests multiplechoice, translation, or recall, which included literal and figurative phrasal verbs, while 15 native speakers took the multiple-choice test. The results show that…

Compares native Spanish-speaking (N=9) and native English-speaking kindergarten students' use of language learning acts after individual peer tutoring sessions in English. Findings reveal that students appear to acquire English according to their level of general academic achievement. (Author/CB)

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)

Examines the occurrence and use of recasts in adult native-speaker/nonnative-speaker interactions in a classroom setting. Focuses on native speaker recasts in three types of negotiations: one-signal negotiated interactions, extended negotiated interactions, and non-negotiated interactions, and on recasts in response to nonnative speaker levels of…

The research reported here tests the claim made in the Input Processing approach to second language (L2) acquisition that interpreting the meaning of language form is essential for learning. This claim has been put forward as an underlying part of the pedagogical package known as Processing Instruction (PI) (VanPatten, 1996, 2002a, 2004). Two…

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)

Two experiments explored factors affecting the influence of visual (lip-read) information on auditory speech perception, the "McGurk effect," in advanced learners of English as a Second Language and native speakers of English. Results demonstrate the influence of first language on the information value of the cues and audiovisual…

Comparison of temporal system acquisition between native English-speaking children and Polish adults learning English revealed that, although native learners comprehended absolute temporal contrasts first and relative components later, the second language-learners' initial temporal systems had both absolute and relative dimensions. (36 references)…

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)

Examination of a second grade additive-bilingual (Spanish-immersion) classroom, compared to a monolingual classroom for nonverbal problem-solving and native-language development, found significant differences in problem solving in favor of the bilingual class and no significant differences in native-language development. (46 references) (Author/CB)

The study reported on in this article set out to replicate and extend Bardovi-Harlig and Dornyei's (1998) investigation of pragmatic awareness by addressing two research questions: (a) Do learners in English as a foreign language (EFL) and English as a second language (ESL) contexts display differences in their recognition and rating of pragmatic…