Although translation is a means of intercultural communication, it represents a challenge when it comes to rendering the intended meaning of some propositions, particularly because every language has its distinctive features and structures that may not be accurately rendered into the target language. This challenge is reinforced when translation…

In a study with seventh- and eighth-graders, Spanish-English bilinguals (n=41) and English monolinguals (n=48) used brief English contexts to choose among possible meanings for unfamiliar words. Two types of errors were compared: transfer errors, which were answers consistent with Spanish but not English syntax, and non-transfer errors, which were…

A study extended previous research on second language learners' use of interlanguage knowledge in making grammaticality judgments. The grammatical construction under consideration is the existential-presentational (E-P) sentence. This construction is described, and it is shown how, due to universal constraints of information structure, it is…

Reports a study investigating how multilingual language learners evaluate their own multilingualism, how they view the interaction of their different languages, and whether they think the different languages help or hinder them when speaking, listening, understanding, or writing the foreign languages. Ways in which these perceptions can be used to…

The selection of papers from the 6th Annual International Conference on Pragmatics and Language Learning (Urbana, Illinois, April 1992) include: "Discourse Markers Across Language" (Bruce Fraser); "Conjunction and Causality: Pragmatics and the Lexicon" (Yael Ziv); "Situated Discourse: The Sociocultural Context of…