Examines sentence matching, a methodology frequently used in the second language literature to determine notions of grammaticality of nonnative speakers. Native speakers of French and second language learners of French performed a sentence-matching task focusing on three areas of French grammar: adverb placement, subject-verb agreement, and…

According to the theory of Universal Grammar, the primary linguistic data guides children through an innately specified space of hypotheses. On this view, similarities between child-English and adult-German are as unsurprising as similarities between cousins who have never met. By contrast, experience-based approaches to language acquisition…

The study investigates the relationship between input, UG (Universal Grammar) parameter values, and the native language in the acquisition of a purely semantic property that is superficially unrelated to its syntactic trigger, The Bare Noun/Proper Name parameter (Longobardi, 1991; 1994; 1996; 2001; 2005). On the one hand, English and Italian bare…

In this pilot study looking at interlanguage prosody, normal, and contrastively focused constructions in English were collected from four English-as-a-first-language speakers and four Japanese-as-a-first-language speakers. These productions were then played to six native English speakers to see how well they could identify the stress placement of…

A study analyzed the opening and closing sequences of 11 dyads of native Spanish-speakers in natural telephone conversations conducted in Spanish. The objective was to determine how closely Hispanic cultural patterns of conduct for telephone conversations follow the sequences outlined in previous research. It is concluded that Spanish…

A study investigated whether second language (L2) learners' participation in negotiation with native speakers (NSs) meets their needs for data on L2 lexical and structural features. The question was addressed through an analysis of NS utterances of negotiation that were produced as 20 native speaker-non-native speaker (NS-NNS) dyads carried out…

As part of a research program investigating the interlanguage lexicon of Kenyan learners of English, based on the lexical field of locomotion, a card sorting task was used to produce raw similarity measure data. This was subjected to cluster analysis and multidimensional scaling (MDS). This paper suggests that cluster analysis/MDS of perceived…

A study investigated the possibility that native speakers of American English make coordinated modifications in their speech to non-native addressees, depending on the degree to which the conversation is conventionalized. The specific exchange analyzed was direction-giving, and evidence of use of a "foreigner" register was sought in…

An investigation was conducted by students in a linguistics seminar which had two parts, a matched-guise questionnaire and a semantic differential questionnaire. The content and results of the latter are presented here. The objective of this part of the study was to determine what attitudes French-speaking Swiss students had toward languages they…

The paper being reviewed puts the vernacular in the perspective of the linguistic repertoire of a speech community. It is suggested that the repertoire as a single system should be seen on a societal or individual level rather than on a linguistic level such that various codes are selected by members of the community according to socially…

The study investigates whether input and interaction features which previous research has identified as characteristic of native speaker (NS) - nonnative speaker (NNS) speech (features which occur more frequently in NS-NNS speech than in speech between NSs) will occur with equal frequency in NS-NNS speech settings in which the NNSs have…

The intelligibility of crosslanguage voice communication in American English was studied in situations where the phonemes of that language are uttered by American speakers and identified by speakers of German, French, and Mexican Spanish and in situations where they are uttered by speakers of German, French, and Mexican Spanish and identified by…

This paper challenges from a practical point of view the idea that the phonemic principle is the most adequate or the optimal theoretical basis for devising a romanized alphabet for a language. In the past, romanization of languages, written or unwritten, have largely been based on the phonemic principle and have unnecessarily burdened the learner…

Overlapping samples of 191, 142, and 87 undergraduates rated pairs of sentences for the frequency and acceptability of the syntactic constructions represented to investigate the feasibility of using such ratings in the study of syntactic forms. The results indicated that subjects are consistent in their judgments of both the frequency and…

Data from undergraduates' ratings of the frequency and acceptability of selected syntactic constructions are analyzed for linguistically defined sets. Mean ratings of frequency and acceptability as well as the results from a cluster analysis of each set of sentences are given for seven target contrasts: active/passive, may/might, perfect/past,…