Misinterpretations of the logical subject of infinitives by second language learners and prelingually deaf adults are compared with children's extension of the minimal distance principle during acquisition of infinitive complement structures and other research studies. Later acquisition of certain structure is explained in terms of the sentences'…

Analysis of the communicative setting of televised electoral debates in Israel focused on the stylistic features of the political candidates' discourse. The analysis identified and described such rhetorical strategies as figurative expressions and intensifiers, irony and rhetorical questions, repetition and parallelism, and meta-discoursive…

This case study investigated whether patterns obtained from elicited speech also hold for conversational data. A longitudinal corpus of spontaneous/natural speech from an adult first-language Spanish learner of second-language Swedish is studied. (Author/VWL)

This study of the speech of a five-year-old Japanese girl learning English focused on the use of prefabricated routines where items are memorized as wholes. The forms of the copula, "do you" questions and embedded "how to" questions were examined. (AG)

An analysis of speech samples collected from adult ESL students revealed recurring variants indicating that learners attempt to simplify the target language in several ways. A universal process of simplification in language learning is postulated to account for the recurrence of the same variants in different learner idiolects. (Author/KM)

A longitudinal study of a Japanese-speaking learner of English as a second language (ESL) analyzed the learner's article system and found that it was not target-like but also not totally random. (Author/CB)

Studies of second language acquisition have concentrated primarily on the speech production of their subjects. This article discusses the relationship between speech directed to the learner and his speech production. (Author/KM)

A study was designed to ascertain whether syntactic avoidance behavior could be demonstrated for two groups of ESL learners (native speakers of Arabic and of Spanish and Portuguese) in accordance with contrastive analysis difficulty predictions. An avoidance pattern was found in accordance with such predictions. (CHK)

Reports the results of an experiment which tested the ability of native English-speaking students of Spanish and native Spanish speakers to comprehend an oral passage, in Spanish, and remember the word order of certain sentences. The findings indicate that word order significantly affected the degree of the English speakers' comprehension.…

Reports the findings of research on the acquisition of French intonation by native speakers of Canadian English and Japanese. Results show that cross-linguistic influence in intonation is of central importance to the learner's acquisition of the target system, and that one should not underestimate the degree of the complexity of that influence.…

All second language (L2) learning theories presuppose that learners learn the target language from the speech signal (or written material, when learners are reading), so an understanding of learners' ability to detect and represent novel patterns in linguistic stimuli will constitute a major building block in an adequate theory of second language…

The discoveries of theoretical linguistics could aid teachers in explaining such usages as "well,""sort of," sex link uses, and forms marking levels of politeness. Conversely, there is much about second language learning that theoretical linguistics could learn from applied linguistics. (Author/KM)

Recent research indicates that interaction patterns between parent and child change according to the increasing language skill of the child. These patterns are linguistically summarized here. All are correlated with the child's age, but many relationships are still unexplored. (Author/KM)

Tests a model of second-language phonological acquisition that proposes a hierarchical relationship between language-specific transfer processes and universal development processes in terms of chronology and style. This was accomplished through an investigation of the consonant cluster production of four Brazilian learners of English. Claims of…