The Malay language has a transparent morphological system and, unlike English, it is written in a very shallow alphabetic-syllabic script. We predicted that beginner spellers (six-to eight-year-olds) of this Rumi script would encode words at the level of the syllable and morpheme, rather than the phoneme. Using the results of a 75-item spelling…

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)

Examines the sound-to-letter patterns of misspelling in a Danish child at ages seven and eight by comparing his misspellings with transcriptions of his pronunciation. (MSE)

Effects of orthographic transparency were examined by comparing children learning to read in Albanian, Welsh, and English. Twenty Year 1 Albanian children were given a reading test consisting of a 100-word stratified sample of decreasing written frequency. They were able to read accurately 80% of the words; reading latency was a direct effect of…

Reports on experiments where Arabic-speaking subjects were asked to scan arrays of digits in both standard "Western numeral" and "Indian numeral" forms, and compares array-scanning patterns observed with patterns observed with speakers of other languages, particularly English. The implications in terms of the use of…

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…

A language instruction technique that uses students' foreign language errors to point up contrasts and similarities in the native and foreign languages is described as it was used with Albanian students learning French. (MSE)

This study examined the interlanguage syntax of Arabic speaking learners of English in the area of the noun phrase, focusing on the closed system elements that can occur before or after the noun head, the noun head and pronouns in line with Quirk and Greenbaum's (1977) treatment of the noun phrase. Participants were 25 Arabic speaking English…

This study examined learners' productive competence in collocations and idioms by means of their performance on two interdependent tasks. Participants were two groups of English as a Foreign Language undergraduate and graduate students from the English department at Jordan's Yarmouk University. The two tasks included the following: a multiple…

Comparison of Chinese, Malay, and Tamil primary school students' responses to a test featuring 19 error types related to English verb structure revealed no significant differences between the three groups' selection of developmental errors. The test also showed promise in measuring students' English accuracy as opposed to fluency. (CB)

A study of subject-verb agreement in 3-year-old speakers of Brazilian Portuguese found an overall low error rate, but with important contrasts in both frequency of production of different verb inflections and rate of agreement errors associated with them, suggesting subject-verb agreement is acquired piecemeal and the learning of particular verb…

A certain group of English verbs, the ergatives, is consistently mis-passivized in Chinese-speakers' interlanguage. Comparison of the ergative construction in Chinese and English shows that they share similar properties. However, this does not seem to facilitate learning of the target English construction. Furthermore, the passive ergatives are…

This study analyzed informal Finnish compositions written by the first pupils in Vaasa (Finland) who were taught Swedish by immersion method and the compositions of their parallel class. Compositions in the fourth and fifth forms were compared. The immersion pupils were taught mostly in Swedish, while their peers in the parallel group were taught…

This study analyzed the pronunciation of English interdental fricatives by two native speakers of Turkish, focusing on whether there was systematic variation of forms according to the kind of discourse and the surrounding phonemes. Subjects were two adult Turkish learners of English as a Second Language, both of whom had been in the United States…

This transcript of and guide to a two-cassette course designed to assist immigrants in erasure of their foreign accents can be used for either individual or group study. Narrative and taped demonstrations of American English that pinpoint typical phonological barriers and pronunciation difficulties are outlined. The author's own system of…