The emergence of empirical approaches to L2 pronunciation research and teaching is a powerful "fourth wave" in the history of the field. Authored by two leading proponents of evidence-based instruction, this volume surveys both foundational and cutting-edge empirical work and pinpoints its ramifications for pedagogy. The authors begin by…

A study of the use of the complex Finnish morphological rule system in 45 children, aged 20-24 months, examined the children's inflection of nouns and verbs in speech characteristic of everyday Finnish. Analysis of the correct, unanswered, and incorrect test items found six classes of errors, which were then examined for clues to the underlying…

A study tested the hypothesis that spoken language has a strong direct influence on the encoding process, and that speakers of nonstandard dialects have a different set of problems with the written language and make identifiably different errors than do speakers of standard dialect. The subjects, 13 standard and 13 nonstandard dialect speakers…

This longitudinal study evaluated grammatical judgments of "well formedness" of children (N=21) with specific language impairment (SLI). Comparison with two control groups found that children with SLI rejected morphosyntactic errors they didn't commit but accepted errors they were likely to make. Findings support the extended optional infinitive…

It is proposed that error patterns in acquisition of a second language can provide otherwise unavailable evidence for testing linguistic hypotheses about the second language itself. Three types of production and perceptual error patterns found in the learning of English by native Arabic speakers are outlined to support this suggestion. The error…

A listing of substantial, known adult speech error corpora includes seven major corpora in English, 11 in languages other than English (German, Swedish, Dutch, Norwegian, Portuguese, Japanese, and Thai), information on seven collectors of smaller English samples, and two references for anecdotal samples, one in French and one in Welsh. Each major…

A study of overt audible speech behavior in eight male and one female Swedish adults examined the relationship between disfluency and speaking modality, disfluency type in mild versus severe stutterers, and disfluency and psycholinguistic variables. Three conditions of experimental manipulation were used: reading aloud, reading the longer lines of…

A story format and discourse analysis procedure was used to evaluate the spoken language skills of 20 elementary students with learning disabilities over a 1-year period. Stories from memory were longer and characterized by more as well as different types of errors than were stories from pictures or stories based on games. (Author/DB)

Researchers investigating the cerebral information processing of visual stimuli have usually followed the pattern of stimulating the subject's eyes with light and observing accompanying changes in brain wave patterns. Such visually evoked responses (VERs) have been found to discriminate bright from dull children and dyslexic from normal readers.…

Supports the use of the applied linguistics technique of error analysis (i.e., charting and analyzing patterns in language errors) in developmental writing instruction. Argues that error enables teachers to diagnose the cognitive strategies and processes used by students in writing. Discusses teaching strategies and the approach's limitations.…

Examined five possible rules that children might use to interpret the terms "big" and "little." Increasing consistency in rule usage appeared to be the most significant developmental progression for children between the ages of three and five with respect to these terms. (Author/RH)

A theory of how people learn certain procedural skills is presented. It is based on the idea that the teaching and learning that goes on in a classroom is like an ordinary conversation. The speaker (teacher) compresses a non-linear knowledge structure (the target procedure) into a linear sequence of utterances (lessons). The listener (student)…

Examination of the lexical errors (phonological paraphasias and neologisms) of two posterior aphasic patients who are speakers of Finnish, a highly synthetic language, revealed that the lexical difficulties generally typical of posterior aphasics were found in these patients as well. The typical lexical difficulties clustered around open class…

Three classes of conceptual bugs presenting obstacles to all novice programmers and not related to any specific program--parallelism, intentionality, and egocentrism--are identified and exemplified through student errors. It is suggested these bugs are rooted in students' intuitive feeling that programming languages, like humans, have intelligent,…

This paper discusses the speech monitoring process that underlies overt self-repairing of speech errors; the covert repair hypothesis, dealing particularly with explaining the variety of disfluency types from a restricted set of repair principles; quantitative and qualitative characteristics of disfluency in people who stutter; and the covert…