This study investigates how "phonological neighborhood density" (PND) affects word production and recognition in 4-to-6-year-old Russian children in comparison to adults. Previous experiments with English-speaking adults showed that a dense neighborhood facilitated word production but inhibited recognition whereas a sparse neighborhood…

Purpose: The current study was designed to (a) describe average hourly Language Environment Analysis (LENA) data for preschool-age Spanish--English bilinguals (SEBs) and typically developing monolingual peers and (b) compare LENA data with mean length of utterance in words (MLUw) and total number of words (TNW) calculated on a selected sample of…

Purpose: There is a paucity of information detailing the phonological skills of Spanish-English bilingual children and comparing that information to information concerning the phonological skills of predominantly English-speaking (PE) and predominantly Spanish-speaking (PS) children. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship…

The grammatical deviations produced by 26 migrant children were categorized into tenses (formation and usage), pronoun usage, subject-verb agreement, possessive adjectives, negation, number concord in antecedents, irregular morpheme construction, irregular syntactic constructions, modification of nouns, preposition substitution, word omission in…

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)

Examines the pragmatic uses of narrative structures in the written stories of native-English speaking and native-Spanish speaking college students. It is shown that there are subtle differences in the way that the two groups use structures, suggesting that native-English and native-Spanish narrators have differing perceptions of themselves and…

Discusses some syntactic evidence gathered in a recent study which suggests not only that the dialect of Puerto Rican Spanish spoken in the New York area may be undergoing greater change than has previously been documented, but also that English interference cannot adequately account for the nature of that change. (EKN)

Five- and seven-year-old English and Spanish speaking children were tested on short term memory, perceptual matching, and referential communication tasks to determine the relationship between linguistic coordination and language group. English speakers had significantly lower performance on the communication and perceptual tasks. (Author/APM)

A study analyzed patterns in one speech act, that of refusal, in 60 native English speakers (responding in English only) and 120 native Spanish speakers (60 responding in English and 60 in Spanish). Native English speakers were college students in the United States and Spanish speakers were students in Spain. A questionnaire was used to elicit…

THIS ARTICLE IS NOT CONCERNED WITH WRITING A TRANSFORMATIONAL GENERATIVE GRAMMAR FOR REFLEXIVE SENTENCES OF ENGLISH AND SPANISH BUT RATHER WITH THE THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK OF TRANSFORMATIONAL ANALYSIS--THE UNDERLYING, FUNDAMENTAL NOTIONS THAT CAN BE APPLIED TO PROBLEMS OF LANGUAGE TEACHING. THE AUTHORS RELATE THESE NOTIONS (LINGUISTIC UNIVERSALS,…

The Spanish tense system was chosen as a starting point to establish the systematic character of the Spanish used in situations of intense code switching between Spanish and English. The tense system was chosen for two reasons: (1) the distinction among past tenses (in particular, the imperfect indicative vs. the preterite and the past continuous)…

The internalized grammar of the bilingual is different from that of a monolingual. The bilingual has, in addition to the entries that are proper to each of the two languages he speaks, certain union entries. These are extensive in the case of the Spanish/English bilingual since there are many items in the two languages that manifest systematic…

A study examines two major types of vowel systems in languages, centripetal and centrifugal. English is associated with the centripetal system, in which vowel quality and quantity (rhythm) are heavily influenced by stress. In this system, vowels have a strong tendency to move toward the center of the vowel area. Spanish is associated with the…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 17 titles deal with the following topics: oral language characteristics of college freshmen; the language development of a modern day "wild child"; children's understanding of relational terms; the relationship of…

Investigates the real-time costs of sentence processing in early Spanish-English bilinguals. Bilinguals use an amalgam of monolingual strategies in choosing the agent of a sentence. The reaction time data reveal a larger language-specific component than the choice data. (37 references) (Author/CK)