Evidence of sensitivity to graphotactic and morphological patterns in English spelling has been extensively examined in monolinguals. Comparatively few studies have examined bilinguals' sensitivity to spelling regularities. The present study compared late Chinese-English bilinguals and English monolinguals on their sensitivity to systematic…

Phonotactic patterns are generalizations that govern the order of consonants and vowels, within words and syllables. Certain second-order phonotactic patterns--those that relate multiple sounds within a syllable, such as "if the vowel is [near-close near-front unrounded vowel], then [s] can only appear at the end of the…

Phonotactics--constraints on the position and combination of speech sounds within syllables--are subject to statistical differences that gradiently affect speaker and listener behavior (e.g., Vitevitch & Luce, 1999). What statistical properties drive the acquisition of such constraints? Because they are naturally highly correlated, previous…

Well-documented Romance-Germanic differences in the use of accent in speech to convey information-structure and focus cause problems for the assessment of prosodic skills in populations with clinical disorders. The strategies for assessing the ability to use lexical and contrastive accent in English and Spanish are reviewed, and studies in the…

Discusses the significance of causation/reasoning patterns in Korean. Presents crucial examples of acquisition errors of the patterns collected from students learning Korean as a foreign language and proposes an alternative explanation and analysis of these patterns.(Author/VWL)

Analyzes the overgeneralizations of bilingual children to determine whether the overgeneralizations of Spanish and English monolinguals would differ from those found in the speech samples of Spanish-English bilinguals and to reach a better understanding of speakers' preference for certain affixes and roots. (MES)

The Spanish psychological verb construction seems to be especially difficult for native English-speaking learners to acquire. Since some of the most common Spanish psych verbs, such as "gustar" (to please) and "encantar" (to delight), require a grammatical structure that is different from that of the English verbs frequently…

Analysis of the first 4 months of word combinations recorded for an Estonian-English learning child suggests that meaning-based generativity may play a role in this important transition in that mixed language utterances, sequence reversals, and errors revealing early attempts at analysis provide clear evidence that distributional learning alone…

The guide to "false friends," or false cognates, in German and English is designed such that it can be used as either an instructional tool or a reference guide. An introductory section defines false friends and discusses different types, and provides a set of symbols for distinguishing them. The first major section lists, alphabetically…

The second guide to "false friends," or false cognates, in German and English lists and discusses more difficult terms than the first guide. An introductory section defines false friends and discusses different types, and provides a set of symbols for distinguishing them. The first major section lists, alphabetically in German, and…

In a study with seventh- and eighth-graders, Spanish-English bilinguals (n=41) and English monolinguals (n=48) used brief English contexts to choose among possible meanings for unfamiliar words. Two types of errors were compared: transfer errors, which were answers consistent with Spanish but not English syntax, and non-transfer errors, which were…

A study investigated the use of negative polarity items (NPIs) in child language, and in particular, how children acquire the restrictions on these items. Data are drawn from studies of NPIs in the spontaneous speech of Dutch- and English-speaking children. Results show the first NPIs to appear in Dutch and English are widely different…

The second volume in this series on Serbo-Croatian-English contrastive analysis contains seven articles. They are: "The Use of Contrastive and Error Analysis to Practicing Teachers," by Rudolf Filipovic; "Some Problems in Teaching English Noun Phrases as Subject to Serbo-Croatian Speakers,""Problems in Teaching the Structure of Some English Noun…

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…

A study investigated patterns in the apparent syntactic errors of native English-speaking, upper-level learners of Arabic as a foreign language. One hundred writing samples, including summaries, criticisms, and free composition, were gathered from a number of university courses. Error types analyzed included articles, subordinate clauses, two-word…