Reexamines the question of why pattern practice fails by hypothesizing about the information processing activities that they entail. (Author/CFM)

This volume focuses on the psycholinguistic aspects of language transfer when three languages are in contact, and provides an overview of the state of the art in cross-linguistic influence in third language acquisition. This edited volume contains, in addition to an introduction, ten chapters. Chapter titles include the following: "The Effect of…

Investigation of the monitoring behavior of Turkish children speaking Dutch as a second language found that subjects' use repairs increased or decreased with a certain age. A positive relationship was found between monitoring use and subjects' cognitive skills and second language proficiency. (27 references) (Author/CB)

This paper reports replications of studies of implicit artificial grammar (AG) learning and explicit series-solution learning with experienced second language learners in order to examine their population and content generalizability. As found by Reber, Walkenfeld, and Hernstadt (1991), there was significantly greater variance in explicit compared…

Research by the staff and advanced students of the North Dakota Summer Institute of Linguistics is presented. In "Verb Agreement and Case Marking in Burushaski" (Stephen R. Willson), an overview of Burushaski morphology and syntax is presented, with special attention to verb agreement and case marking. "A Backwards Binding Construction in Zapotec"…

Issues concerning the language of instruction used in teaching English to native speakers of Chinese, particularly adolescents, are discussed. The discussion draws on research in two areas: the role of language medium in the acquisition of concepts, and psycholinguistic differences between Chinese and English. It is concluded that while the…

A study investigated how Chinese children and adults interpreted sentences containing universal quantifiers and existential quantifiers. The purpose was to get preliminary evidence on whether Chinese children understand scope relations and whether they know which relations are possible for particular syntactic configurations. Subjects were 192…

In order to build robust natural language processing systems that can detect and recover from miscommunication, the investigation of how people communicate and how they recover from problems in communication described in this artificial intelligence report focused on reference problems which a listener may have in determining what or whom a…

Language is a complex social event. The rules determining its use vary with (1) the language field--the subject, text, and purpose; (2) the tenor of the social interaction; and (3) the mode or type of communication being used. The impact of the field, tenor, and mode on language use is reflected in a college student's retelling of a story to a…

One of a regular series on the status and progress of studies on the nature of speech, instrumentation for its investigation, and practical applications, this report covers the period January 1 to March 31, 1985. Studies summarized in the report cover such topics as (1) segmentation of coarticulated speech in perception (2) intrinsic time in…

Certain aspects of the reading process have suggested that second language reading skills are determined to some extent by native language reading skills. Some of this research is reviewed here and an experiment is described in which the reading skills in Spanish and English of three groups of Spanish speakers learning English are compared.…

A discussion of word acquisition rates and strategies is based upon a 6-month case study of an Estonian-speaking child who gradually and systematically relaxed phonotactic constraints to allow greater complexity in word production. In addition to the cognitive tools of assimilation and accomodation as described by Piaget, the child used a further…

Philippine students in grades K-6, representing different socioeconomic classes, participated in individual elicitation sessions. Using Pilipino (Tagalog) as the language of elicitation, experimenters used pictorial stimuli to elicit specific structures of English grammar, in order to discover if the subjects had mastered these structures. Only…

Current research on adult second language learning suggests that study is necessary to separate interference variables from intralinguistic variables and to determine the relative difficulty of structures in each group. This research on the acquisition of the English relative clause was specifically designed to test the transfer hypothesis…

Foreigner talk (FT) is the term used to characterize possible adjustments in the speech of a native speaker (NS) when he or she is in conversation with a non-native speaker (NNS). The paper examines conversations between 6 native speakers and 3 non-native speakers and characterizes the speech of the native-speakers involved. The data were…