The goal of this study is to describe the acquisition rate for gender acquisition in Spanish and to show whether individual variability and language contact may affect this rate. The participants were intermediate second language Spanish (first language English) learners in the study abroad and at-home contexts over a 4-month period. The…

This study examines the object case markings "o" and "ga" in Japanese with respect to the degree of predictability. A speaker who assumes that the listener will have difficulty identifying the referent, tends to use a construction type that enables the listener to uniquely identify the referent. This notion of predictability is…

English nominalizations turn verbs and adjectives into nouns systematically, but their meanings can change unpredictably. In the United States, college composition handbooks urge students to avoid using nominalizations, but elsewhere secondary students learn to write them responsibly and to recognize being manipulated when reading them.…

Proposes a dynamical systems approach to parsing in which syntactic hypotheses are associated with attractors in a metric space. The experiments discussed documented various contingent frequency effects that cut across traditional linguistic grains, each of which was predicted by the dynamical systems model. (47 references) (Author/CK)

Points out that earlier research (1991) indicates that adult second language (L2) learners have difficulties determining the relationship between obligatory verb-raising and verbal inflection. Results of the experiments reported here indicate that L2 competence includes a deficit affecting only the lexical or morphosyntactic mechanisms involved in…

This paper examines three ways in which the Spanish imperfect and preterite are theoretically conceptualized and how such conceptions are realized practically in elementary Spanish textbooks. An attempt is made to present the three approaches as constituting a theoretical progression rather than viewing them as isolated treatments of the same…

This study investigated how Korean adult learners of English at various levels of proficiency interpret English reflexives. The subjects consisted of 15 ninth-graders with 2.5 years of English instruction, 15 eleventh-graders with 4.5 years of instruction, 15 first-year college students with 6.5 years of instruction, and 15 graduate students who…

A study investigated the use of lexical certainty modifiers, which have a mitigating or emphasizing function (e.g., "I suppose,""sort of,""obviously"). Although certainty modifiers add little to the referential information of messages, they can be very important interpersonally, particularly in terms of politeness.…

A study compared the perceptions of two experts from different cultural backgrounds concerning salience of a variety of errors typical of the English written by Hong Kong secondary and college students. A book on English error types written by a Hong-Kong born, fluent Chinese-English bilingual linguist was analyzed for its emphases, and a list of…