Acquisition in general and first language acquisition in particular is a very complex and a multifaceted phenomenon. The way that children acquire a language in a very limited period is astonishing. Various approaches have been proposed so far to account for this extraordinary phenomenon. These approaches are indeed based on various philosophical…

In response to Ellis (2002), which resurrects the notion that language acquisition consists of frequency-based abstraction of regularities from input, this article suggests Ellis ignores fundamental and well-known problems, including the poverty of the stimulus, cases of instantaneous acquisition, and evidence for innate knowledge. (Author/VWL)

Deals with lexical derivation as it is manifested in the oral and written production of anglophone learners of Italian. Assumes that lexical derivation belongs to that linguistic competence which is based on creativity and that no essential differences exist between the ability of native and nonnative speakers to utilize this competence. (SED)

Examines the innate faculties that underlie linguistic competence, especially syntactic competence, and proposes a theory of these faculties which accounts for the complexities of language and the evolution of human language. (AM)

Describes attempts to formalize and characterize a theory of communicative competence, focusing on the advantages of a preference model (which identifies and grades learning variables in order of importance) and of models developed on the premise of parallel distributed processing (which suggest that such rule-based processing are in fact gross…

A contrastive analysis (CA) does not require commitment to directionality. Even asymmetrical interlingual correspondence can be handled by adirectional statements. If well executed, a CA is capable of handling three pairs of L2 learning phenomena: (1) going from language A to language B and vice versa; (2) productive and receptive command; and (3)…

This research is based on the assumption that a Spanish/English bilingual is aware of the phonological and semantic relatedness of the many hundreds of pairs of transparently cognate items in the two languages. This awareness is linguistically significant in that it is reflected in the internalized grammar of the bilingual. The bilingual speaker…

Speech performance data, including hesitations in the stream of speech, fragmented words or phrases, retracings, and the use of intonation contours for noncommunicative purposes, are examined. It is proposed that these types of speech phenomena are indicative of underlying hypothesis testing and utterance planning strategies. Data produced by 48…

This research explored the fundamental processes involved in comprehending linguistic material: the duration of the process, the sequence of processes, and the sources of errors. One project examined the comprehension of affirmative and negative sentences that are read and verified with respect to a picture. A model developed to account for the…

The use of locative prepositions in the spontaneous speech of 30 Hebrew speaking children two to three years old was studied. The rank order of locative prepositions is determined according to the correct use in obligatory contexts, and tentative conclusions are drawn concerning the order of acquisition of these terms in Hebrew. An attempt is made…

The chapters in this volume represent a type of current psycholinguistic research that focuses both on the nature of human information processing and the coding of linguistic structure. The chapters and authors are as follows: (1) "The Wherefores and Therefores of the Competence-Performance Distinction," by V. Valian; (2) "Levels of Processing and…

Little has been done to test or describe reading strategies of second language learners. The study reported in this paper was an attempt to begin to investigate the nature of perceptual strategies which second language learners employ when reading certain English structures, and to ask the question of whether second language learners, when…