A common assumption underlying cross-linquistic studies in child language is that the comparison of any feature in unrelated languages may simplify semantic-grammatical complexities in a way that studies on a single language cannot. This paper begins by discussing the order of acquisition of grammatical morphemes in Spanish by four…

A longitudinal study of English acquisition by a Vietnamese mother and her daughter is reported. Subjects of this study are Lan, a young Vietnamese woman in her late twenties, and her daughter Than, who was four years old at the time this study began. Neither knew any English when they resettled in Texas in the summer of 1975 after fleeing from…

Following a brief summary of Trubetzkoy's views of Russian word roots, a statistical analysis is performed on a short literary passage in seeking to examine whether all types of roots merely coexist in modern Russian or whether there is an expansion of certain types and a contraction of others. Results point out statistical and semantic…

While reviewing the controversial concept of describing language via the phoneme, the author spells out many problems caused by the discrepancies of phonemic theory and actual speech production. Phonological variation in actual speech utterances prompts the analysis of the phonology of language on two levels--the phonemic and the distinctive…

This booklet forms a part of the Hungarian-English Contrastive Linguistics Project which is concerned with investigating the differences and similarities between these two languages with implications for second language acquisition. The papers here deal with the Hungarian writing system. Initial remarks concern the relationship between script and…

In a study of the detection of test item bias, Chinese speakers and Spanish speakers were administered a measure of pronunciation accuracy for the (d) and (z) morphemes. Six indices were calculated for each item: item difficulty, point biserial correlation coefficient, item variance, chi-square, Rasch logit of difficulty, and the average…

This paper contends that children's failure to demonstrate predictable gains in reading ability may be attributable to the failure of the teaching program to focus on strategies involving larger and larger chunking of the language accesses. Teaching programs in reading should be constructed to develop middle-level reading skills. Such programs…

This longitudinal study of bilingual language acquisition analyzes the order of acquisition of English grammatical morphemes in a child bilingual in English and Chichewa (a Bantu lanugage of East Central Africa). The order of acquisition obtained is compared to that obtained by Brown (1973) for monolingual English speaking children and that…

Seventeen reprinted essays and an unpublished one are contained in this collection and organized under five headings: History of Ideas, Approaches to Medieval Literature, Chaucer and Fourteenth-Century English Literature, Language and Linguistics, and Essay-Reviews. Topics discussed include the origin of the concept of the Seven Cardinal Sins;…

Foreign influences in the Russian language leading to linguistic change through loanword borrowing, loan translation, and loan shifts are explored in this article. Related concepts of the processes described are often accompanied by comparative word lists. Comment on the evolution of the Russian language begins with the Proto-Slavic period and is…

It is possible to observe phonological innovations in Quechua B in purely linguistic terms, abandoning the use of dialects and subdialects. Isolect and lect are used instead. A particular speech form, with respect to a particular innovation, is an isolect in one of three possible ways: it lacks the innovation; it has the innovation as a variable…

A literature survey to determine problems American Indians experience with English focused on problems solvable through computer presentation of materials. Recommendations included practice in selected minimally contrasting vowel pairs/consonant pairs, final consonants/consonant clusters, irregular plural nouns, verb tense forms, determiners,…

This article examines evidence provided by quantitative and qualitative measurement of second language (L2) proficiency by elementary-level learners of French, following participation in a school foreign exchange visit. Based on a study consisting of a controlled analysis of test results from 68 pupils studying French at three secondary schools in…

This study analyses specific written discourse production in which NNSs' usage of English tenses and voice appears to be dramatically different from that of NSs. The data for the study narrowly focuses on a small number of verb phrase features, such as tenses, aspects and the passive voice, examining how they are presented in writing instruction…

A study of the dialogue journal writing of six sixth grade students of English as a Second Language (ESL) examines the interaction with the teacher. The subjects had been in the United States for less than a year, and came from Korean, Vietnamese/Chinese, Burmese, and Italian language backgrounds. Data for the study were drawn from the students'…