This paper explores whether English-Mandarin bilingual children have mastered discourse skills and whether they show sensitivity to the discourse principle of information status of referents in their speech and gestures. We compare the speech and gestures produced by bilingual children to those produced by English- and Mandarin-speaking…

Dual-system models suggest that English past tense morphology involves two processing routes: rule application for regular verbs and memory retrieval for irregular verbs. In second language (L2) processing research, Ullman suggested that both verb types are retrieved from memory, but more recently Clahsen and Felser and Ullman argued that past…

Study examined native Japanese speakers at two levels of English language experience and compared performance to native American-English speakers to determine whether Japanese-English bilinguals with intensive experience conversing with native English speakers would identify and discriminate /r/ and /l/ perception. Concludes that native Japanese…

Describes two research programs on the syntactic abilities of hearing impaired and normal hearing individuals. The first program involved deaf students acquiring English structure; the second involved the construction of the Test of Syntactic Abilities and its application to deaf, hard of hearing, and normal hearing students in the United States,…

Investigated processing of English wh-questions by native speakers of English and advanced Chinese, German, and Korean learners of English as a Second Language. Performance was evaluated in relation to parsing strategies and sensitivity to plausibility constraints. Results suggest native and nonnative speakers employ similar strategies in…

Results of a study of speech production and speech perception by adult learners of English indicate the main differences between native-speaker and nonnative speaker perception and production. Methodological issues are raised relating to the comparison of the two, and the need for further research to evaluate and refine the relationship between…

Practice on cognitive tasks, such as word recognition tasks, will usually lead to faster and more stable responding in a second language. An analysis is presented of the relationship between observed reductions in performance latency and latency variability with respect to whether processing has become faster or whether a qualitative change, such…

Investigates associations of form and meaning in the developing tense and aspect systems of adult learners of English as a Second Language. Learners at six levels of proficiency were studied using a cloze passage and compositions on the same topic. Interlanguage tense and aspect systems showed high formal accuracy but lower appropriate use. (43…

Compared the ability of native language speakers of Japanese with English-speaking students of Japanese, and vice versa, in reporting sentence subjects after listening to Japanese and English word strings. The word strings consisted of one verb and two nouns each. (49 references) (GLR)

Discusses difficulties in perception of English /r/ and /l/ and concludes the error pattern is not predictable on the basis of contrastive phonological analysis but might be the result of acoustic-phonetic factors. (EKN)

A study investigated word recognition processes of Greek/English bilinguals in relation to linguistic and syntactic differences in the languages, then compared those processes with those of monolinguals. Bilingual readers performed differently in the languages, conforming more to monolingual patterns in their native language (Greek), interpreted…

A study investigated differences in English word recognition in native speakers of Indonesian (an alphabetic language) and Chinese (a logographic languages) learning English as a Second Language. Results largely confirmed the hypothesis that an alphabetic first language would predict better word recognition in speakers of an alphabetic language,…

Examination of factors underlying cross-language transfer in metaphor interpretation among bilingual (Spanish-English) 7- to 12-year-olds indicated that metaphor interpretation ability was higher in the older subjects. The level of metaphor interpretation was most strongly related to cognitive-developmental variables that were interdependent…