Certain ill-formed phonological structures are systematically under-represented across languages and misidentified by human listeners. It is currently unclear whether this results from grammatical phonological knowledge that actively recodes ill-formed structures, or from difficulty with their phonetic encoding. To examine this question, we gauge…

This high school teaching guide on the history of the English language consists of 36 short essays written by teachers and assembled under five headings: (1) The Indo-European Language Family, (2) Language Analysis, (3) The Old English Period, (4) The Middle English Period and the Renaissance, and (5) The Modern English Period in America. A…

A linguistic study of syntactic differences in the mass noun-count noun contrast in French and English reveals the problems encountered in the construction of illustrative sentences and other pattern drills. A definitional statement of the distinctions between the two classes of nouns includes numerous examples in both languages. By taking…

This work reports on an initial study of the possibility of providing a suitable framework for the teaching of a foreign language grammar through string analysis, using French as the target language. Analysis of a string word list (word-class sequences) yields an overall view of the grammar. Details are furnished in a set of restrictions which…

This paper is an empirical study of Dryer's (1980) universal hierarchy of positions of sentential complements as a predictor of second language acquisition. The place of universal grammar in second language research is discussed, as is Dryer's hierarchy and preliminary psycholinguistic evidence in support of it. The results of an experiment…

Provides new evidence from Spanish and English self-paced reading experiments on relative clause attachment sites. Suggests that a principle like Late Closure is universally operative in the human parser. Proposes that a second factor is the principle of Predicate Proximity. Discusses the origins and predictions of the theory combining these two…

Contrastive analysis is suggested as a tool in language teaching for such areas as: (1) deciding how much to focus on different aspects of the target language; (2) making generalizations about its structure; and (3) explaining texts or constructions which might otherwise be incomprehensible. The claim is made that such procedures need to be based…