Seventeen native English speakers participated in an investigation of language users' knowledge of English main stress patterns. First, they produced 40 two-syllable nonwords of varying syllabic structure as nouns and verbs. Second, they indicated their preference for first or second syllable stress of the same words in a perception task. Finally,…

A variety of studies have reported that learners of English as a second language find subject relative clauses easier to produce and comprehend than direct object relatives, but it is unclear whether this preference should be attributed to structural factors or to a linear distance effect. This paper seeks to resolve this issue and to extend our…

This study examines the acquisition of English syllable codas by two native speakers of Vietnamese. Data were collected at three intervals over 1 year. Results indicate that a developmental sequence may exist and that this sequence may not be linear, with some longer (i.e., two and three member) codas emerging before some singleton codas.…

This study investigates typological distance and order of acquisition (i.e., the order in which languages were acquired) in the context in which Spanish-English bilingual students, whose first language is English or Spanish, are learning Portuguese as a third language (L3). Participants were asked to think aloud as they worked on pedagogical tasks…

This study places the predictions of the bilingual interactive activation model (Dijkstra & Van Heuven, 1998) and the revised hierarchical model (Kroll & Stewart, 1994) in the same context to investigate lexical processing in a second language (L2). The performances of two groups of native English speakers, one less proficient and the other more…

This study acoustically analyzed the production of single and geminate stops in Japanese by English-speaking children (N = 19) at three different grade levels in a Japanese immersion program. Results show that both their singletons and geminates were significantly longer than those of Japanese monolinguals and the bilinguals' immersion teachers,…

The influence of syllabic structure, lexical class and stress patterns of known words on the acquisition of the English stress system was investigated in ten native Thai speakers. All participants were adult learners of English with an average length of residence in the US of 1.4 years. They were asked to produce and give perceptual judgments on…

This study investigated how native Japanese speakers use honorifics in everyday social interaction. Honorifics are affixes, words, and formulaic phrases that follow linguistic and sociolinguistic rules and are believed to mark a speaker's politeness toward an addressee or another referenced person. The honorific system is incorporated into most…

A study investigated the correct syllabification of intervocalic /tl/ consonant clusters in Spanish dialects that lack word-initial /tl/, using data from Peruvian Spanish. The study attempted to discover native speaker preference through the playing of a popular game involving, in part, dividing a word into syllables. Words containing the /tl/…

Presents the results of an investigation into how native speakers of English provide corrective feedback to errors in conversation with their nonnative speaker friends. Native speakers responded to errors by using either on-record or off-record corrective feedback and several noncorrective discourse devices to repair conversational difficulties.…

Recent research on native speakers' reactions to nonnative speech that views listeners, speakers, and language from a variety of perspectives using both objective and subjective research paradigms is reviewed. Studies of error gravity, relative intelligibility of language samples, the role of accent, speakers' characteristics, and context in which…

Reports on research into the use of the particle "-le" by native speakers of Chinese. (AM)

Addresses the difficulty of article acquisition by examining the perception of noun countability by native speakers of English and Japanese speakers of English, testing whether native and nonnative speakers have different perceptions of countability. Results suggest a possible link between the indefinite versus zero article suppliance by Japanese…

A modified matched guise technique was used with 57 subjects to evaluate 14 recorded voices in 3 accent categories (broad, mild, hypercorrect). Some differences were found between native speakers and nonnative speakers, and the results pose questions in terms of the two distinct judgmental dimensions of solidarity and status. (60 references) (LB)

A study identified second-person singular pronoun usage among Salvadoran speakers living in Houston, Texas, to see what changes, if any, have been caused by contact with other Spanish speakers with different speech patterns. Although the results confirm some linguistic behavior observed by others, some unexpected facts and diverging trends were…