We examined case-marking variation in heritage Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian. Comparing heritage to homeland Polish and Ukrainian speakers, we found only a few types and a few tokens of systematic distinction between heritage and homeland varieties. A total of 6,291 instances of nouns and pronouns were extracted from transcribed conversations…

The question of whether or not linguistic sounds might convey inherent meaning has never conclusively been resolved. This is an empirical study weighing evidence for and against the existence of phonosemantics, also known as sound symbolism or iconism. Contrary to well established principles such as the arbitrary nature of the sign and the double…

This study tests the hypothesis that, among bilingual Mexican Americans, the present progressive tense in Spanish is used in the same situations as the progressive would be used in English, even if such usage would not be prescribed by standard Spanish grammar rules. A review is made of Spanish language instructional textbooks concerning the usage…

Analysis of the performance of beginning American Sign Language students, who had only recently learned the manual alphabet, on a task in which proactive interference would build up rapidly on successive trials, supported the view that different languages have separate memory stores. (Author/CB)

Presents longitudinal data from simultaneously bilingual German-English children with respect to development of negation and syntactically related modal particles. Data provide evidence for both language separation and cross-linguistic influence. Relative order of verbs and sequential modifiers appears not to be a principled syntactic operation,…

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)

In this paper, an attempt is made to explicate the notion "equivalence" in contrastive analysis. It has been suggested that a learner formulates successive hypotheses about the nature of the target language at least partially on the basis of his knowledge of the native language. A deep contrastive study of the two language systems will…

An excerpt from the resolution of the executive committee of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, which espouses the view that no variety or dialect of a language is intrinsically superior to any other, is presented. Implications for teaching standard and nonstandard dialects are discussed. (KC)

An analysis of Brazilian learners' errors in English word stress revealed a difficulty hierarchy of stress pattern rules and six stress prediction strategies: (1) cognate stress patterns; (2) predominant stress patterns of English; (3) initial vowels and consonants; (4) verbs with a tense vowel in the final syllable; (5) tertiary stress; and (6)…

This study is concerned with problems in language learners' intonation of English. Ten intonation problems were found in the learner speech of two adult Spanish-speaking males: (1) range of pitch, (2) initial rise, (3) final fall, (4) rise to final stressed syllable, (5) placement of prominence, (6) final rise for questions, (7) total question…

Analyzes the language acquisition of a bilingual (Estonian/English) child. Discusses his preference for acquiring whole words as opposed to inflections and offers several possible reasons for this particular learning strategy. (EKN)

An analysis of the English word stress placement of six native Arabic speakers and six native English speakers studying Arabic revealed that, while most of the native English subjects produced the expected word stress, the Arab subjects placed stress on English words in conformity with Arabic stress patterns. (CB)

A study examined whether language patterns found in English, which differed from those in Spanish, would have a significant effect on English as a second language (ESL) learners' comprehension while reading English text. Average fifth grade readers were randomly assigned to either an initial Spanish speaking group (N=18) or an initial English…

This report deals with sporadic observations on the glottal stop in the English spoken by Finns. The data were collected in connection with two separate studies. An attempt is made to give a description of the factors which may explain the occurrence of glottalization and to outline the method by which the phenomenon will be approached in greater…

Discusses the results of an error analysis of 100 English compositions written by university students in Iran. It is suggested that mistakes are not primarily due to interference from the native language, but to developmental errors, similar to errors made in first language acquisition. (Author/AMH)