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.…

Investigates the role in learning of rote-learned formulas or chunks. Data were examined from a longitudinal study of 16 child beginner classroom learners of French for occurrences of three chunks, against which definitional criteria were tried out. These forms were then tracked for two years to chart their breakdown and explore their contribution…

Examines incidental and transitory focus on form. Learner uptake was studied in focus-on-form episodes occurring in 12 hours of communicative English-as-a-Second-Language teaching. Learner uptake was generally high and successful--to a much greater extent than has been reported for immersion classrooms. (Author/VWL)

The performance of native and nonnative Hindi-Urdu speaking children (N=131) and adults (N=30) in the comprehension of the Hindi-Urdu correlative constructions was analyzed. Results indicated that Hindi-Urdu correlative constructs are acquired relatively late by both native and nonnative speakers, suggesting that language universals are available…

Examined the influence of the social use and the history of acquisition of Euskera on comprehension and recall of two versions (Euskera-Castilian) of a scientific text read by bilingual high school and college students. Results suggested that both extensive social use and an active history of acquisition of a language improve the level of…

The influence on interlocutors' relative content knowledge on conversational participation in interactions between native speakers (NSs) and nonnative speakers (NNSs) with limited oral skills is investigated. Results indicate that both NSs and NNSs appeared conversationally active, but there were different patterns of participation that could to…

Compares the developmental patterns in the acquisition of negation by five French Creole-speaking and four Creole English-speaking Saint Lucian children ages five and six. Similar patterns of development and error types were found for both groups, but the French Creole speakers remained at a less advanced stage than did the Creole English speakers…

This quasi-experimental study attempts to incorporate grammatical elements into meaning-focused reading classes by attracting learner attention to form with minimal interruption to meaning comprehension. Two hundred fifty-nine Korean English as a foreign language students underwent four different treatments--involving textual enhancement and topic…

This study examines the relationship between how learners of Japanese as a second language perceive the learning of "kanji" (i.e., the logographic characters shared with Chinese) and their ability to learn novel "kanji" words using morphological and contextual information. Eighty college students learning Japanese as a foreign language completed a…

Challenges the claim that adult second language acquisition is characteristically different, cognitively, from that of child first or second language acquisition. (PMP)

Presents an analysis of the tense marking of 16 Vietnamese speakers learning English as a second language, which shows there are a number of surface-level constraints that systematically affect the incidence of tense marking, including the distinction between regular and irregular verbs and the shape of the suffix on the regular verb. (SED)

Addresses the issues of whether test scores are affected by the prior availability of the items on a test. Concludes that, while disclosing items significantly affects test scores, the magnitude of the disclosure effect drecreases with an increase in the size of the disclosed pool. (EKN)

Summarizes a range of theoretical approaches to language acquisition. Argues that language representations emerge from interactions at all levels from brain to society. Connectionism, which provides a set of computational tools for exploring the conditions under which emergent properties arise, is discussed, and simulations of emergence of…

The study sought to examine the effect of lexical aspect and narrative discourse structure on the pattern of acquisition and use of English verbal morphology exhibited by creole-speaking students. Findings indicated that the emergent pattern of morphology in the creole participants' written interlanguage appeared to be influenced not only by…

Studies investigating the possible effects of age at immigration (a proxy for age at onset of second language learning) on second language acquisition among immigrants often explicitly take the effect of length of residence in the destination country (a measure of exposure to opportunities to learn the second language) into account. A third…