Summarizes a study of advanced ESL university students from eight first-language backgrounds and discusses the proficiency differences found between several groups in processing two types of information patterns in written English. Suggests possible variables in cognitive strategies and skills related to the students' different cultural/linguistic…

Reviews research on prosody and segmental perception, segmentation and invariance, categorical perception of speech and nonspeech, feature detectors, scaling speech sounds to an auditory-articulatory space, acoustic-phonetic dependencies within the syllable, higher order (nonphonetic) factors in the comprehension of fluent speech, and cerebral…

Presents a neurobiologically inspired model of one aspect of adult second language acquisition: procedural linguistic skill acquisition. Notes that the proposed model crucially involves the neural circuitry of the neocerebellum, a brain structure implicated in higher cognitive and, potentially, linguistic functions. (69 references) (Author/CK)

Discusses that Serbo-Croation is a language with a dual system of relative clause formation and describes elicited production and comprehension experiments conducted with preschool children. Results are discussed in the context of the cross-linguistic typology of relative clauses and previous studies of the acquisition of relative clauses. (27…

Summarizes the findings of a project that investigated the use of learning strategies by foreign language students and their teachers, and suggests classroom applications for learning strategy instruction. The project identified the differences in strategy use among effective and ineffective language learners and the ways in which teachers could…

Assessment of the English writing proficiency of 23 native French speaking students on 3 composition tasks found variance in the qualities of written texts and problem-solving behaviors. Writing expertise was found to affect discourse organization and content, writing complexity, heuristic strategies, and control strategies, while second-language…

Examined the use by children of the Novel Name-Nameless Category principle, under the framework that lexical principles are acquired in a developmental sequence. Results indicated that the particular principle was not available at the start of lexical acquisition but that exhaustive categorization ability and a vocabulary spurt occur…

Presents a review of cognitive psychology research dealing with the organization and functioning of oral and written language production mechanisms. Discusses works dealing with the microstructural aspects of language, primarily oral production. Describes how the research perspective has evolved from modular to connectionist models. Examines the…

Responses of native and nonnative English speaking undergraduates regarding the grammaticality of sentences with varying object and subject structures demonstrated that native speakers exhibited a processing preference, as did nonnatives whose native language grammar did not bias them toward another certain structure. (19 references) (Author/CB)

In two experiments, mothers told their infant and an adult a story that involved target words, and women taught an assembly procedure involving novel terminology to another adult. In speech to infants, mothers positioned focused words on pitch peaks, but in speech to adults, the emphasis was more variable. (BC)

Investigated a model of metalinguistic awareness, which consists of two components (the control of linguistic processing and the analysis of linguistic knowledge), in children between the ages of five and seven years. Each of the two components was assessed by four metalinguistic tasks. (Contains 35 references.) (JL)

Phonetic skills and vocabulary size were investigated in 37 toddlers identified with specific expressive language impairment and 20 comparison toddlers. Results indicate significant differences in numbers of consonant types and tokens, although the most frequently present consonants were consistent across groups. No predictive relationship emerged…

Twenty-five advanced Chinese learners of English as a Second Language (ESL) provided grammaticality judents in full-sentence and word-by-word conditions. The results indicated that parsing, and not grammatical competence, is the source of difficulty on performance with subject extraction sentences. Contains 58 references. (MDM)

Developmental aspects of spelling-to-sound mapping for English monosyllabic words are investigated with a simple two-layer network model using a simple, general learning rule. The model is trained on both regularly and irregularly spelled words but extracts regular spelling to sound relationships, which it can apply to new words. Training-related…

While almost all observers agree that young children, older children, and adults differ both in initial rate of acquisition and in the levels of ultimate attainment typically achieved, they continue to disagree over whether the observed patterns are a function of nurture or nature. Is it simply that older starters "do not" do as well because they…