Investigations designed to eliminate ambiguities in the Andre and Kulhavy procedure and to investigate the effects of noun modifications and sentence voice in the category clustering of sentences were conducted. Two experiments were carried out; both employed a mixed factorial design and were prepared in dittoed booklets. The Ss were run in…

A study was conducted to test various explanations of the error of unmarked noun plurals made by first generation Italian immigrants. The error appeared to be "fossilized" or not eradicated over a period of time. (SW)

Investigation of native English-speaking adults' and native Spanish-speaking children's acquisition of noun gender and its function in Spanish revealed significant differences in first- and second-language acquisition, suggesting a developmental progression in acquisition of noun gender for both groups. (Author/CB)

A sentence interpretation experiment conducted with university-age native English speakers, Japanese English as a second language (ESL) speakers, and native Japanese speakers (N=12 per group) suggested caution in attempting to typify languages on the basis of processing strategies drawn from probabilistic tendencies evident in grouped data.…

Reports on a study investigating the unlearning of null subjects and null objects by Chinese students (n=159) of English as a Second Language. Results show an asymmetry in Chinese learners' English, which is opposite to that found in native English. (70 references) (Author/CK)

Examines why learners of Mandarin use overt nouns and pronouns to a greater extent than native speakers. Findings indicate that no single syntactic structure is a significant contributor to the different rates of optional ellipsis but that some learners use ellipsis only in syntactic contexts permissible in English and most use it in a narrower…

Presents a framework for dealing with errors in natural language sentences within the context of automated second-language teaching. Using a feature grammar, it is possible to describe various types of errors in a uniform framework, clearly define an error, and analyze the error source. (24 references) (Author/CK)

Examines how second-language learners compensate for their target language deficiency in communication using the One to One Principle of interlanguage communication. Results indicate that target language aspects not adhering to one-to-one mapping between semantic and surface elements are problematic to the learners and are seemingly acquired late.…

Examines what linguistic devices speakers use to make an entity salient in a discourse and how they re-refer to discourse entities moving in and out of focus. Speakers' center of attention was manipulated via a videotaped basketball game. Speakers referred to prominent entities as subjects; when they referred to them as objects, they repeated the…

Explores the attrition of different aspects of Swedish grammar. Empirical data from bilingual expatriate students are compared to data from monolingual Swedish aphasic patients. The students' noun phrase morphology had undergone attrition, but not their word order. For the aphasics, word order attrition was combined with unaffected noun phrase…

The experiments reported here were designed to investigate the influence of stress typicality during speeded grammatical classification of disyllabic English words by native and non-native speakers. Trochaic nouns and iambic verbs were considered to be typically stressed, whereas iambic nouns and trochaic verbs were considered to be atypically…

Eight original research papers on Native American languages by faculty and students of the Linguistics Department and other related departments of the University of Kansas are presented. The titles and authors include the following: "Comanche Consonant Mutation: Initial Association or Feature Spread?" (James L. Armagost); "The Alsea…

Five original research papers by faculty of the Department of Linguistics at the University of Southern Illinois at Carbondale are presented. The titles and authors are as follows: "Measuring the Instructional Sensitivity of ESL (English as a Second Language) Reading Comprehension Items" (Sheila R. Brutten, John T. Mouw, and Kyle…

This study attempts to identify what mechanisms might be used to reduce gender bias in two highly inflected languages, Greek and Arabic. Twenty native speakers of Greek and Arabic attending Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., were surveyed for the experiment. The students were: (1) asked to read a standard job announcement in their native…

An investigation of the first language acquisition of productive nouns in Inuktitut (Inupiaq) is presented. This study begins with descriptions of noun incorporation, relevant aspects of the structure of Inuktitut, and working criteria of productivity. Acquisition data from Inuktitut and corroborating data from Greenlandic are outlined and…