This study examined metalinguistic awareness in children who were becoming bilingual in an immersion education program. The purpose was to determine at what point in emerging bilingualism the previously reported metalinguistic advantages appear and what types of metalinguistic tasks reveal these developmental differences. Participants were 124…

A large-scale study of complex "wh"-questions with 1,000 subjects aged 4-9 years is reported. The subjects' dialects were Mainstream American English or African American English, and approximately one-third were language impaired. The study examined when children permit long distance "wh"-movement, and when they respect a variety of syntactic…

Results of a study of speech production and speech perception by adult learners of English indicate the main differences between native-speaker and nonnative speaker perception and production. Methodological issues are raised relating to the comparison of the two, and the need for further research to evaluate and refine the relationship between…

Discusses difficulties in perception of English /r/ and /l/ and concludes the error pattern is not predictable on the basis of contrastive phonological analysis but might be the result of acoustic-phonetic factors. (EKN)

Investigates the real-time costs of sentence processing in early Spanish-English bilinguals. Bilinguals use an amalgam of monolingual strategies in choosing the agent of a sentence. The reaction time data reveal a larger language-specific component than the choice data. (37 references) (Author/CK)