The tendency for negation to appear early in the sentence, dubbed the "Neg-First principle" by Horn (1989:452), has been observed in the domains of typology, language contact, and language acquisition. Based on evidence from these fields, scholars have speculated about the source and universality of Neg-First biases affecting language…

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…

This research aims to identify the types of interference and factor of interference. The object of this research is the daily conversations of the students at a University in Indonesia. The research focused on English interference that occurs in Javanese Language and Indonesian Language in everyday conversation. Data is obtained by observation…

This research investigated on the first language interference in learning the English language among three cultural groups -- the Ilocano, the Ibanag, and the Itawes. The subject of the study were sixty sophomore students from the College of Education and the College of Business Entrepreneurship, and Accountancy who are officially enrolled at…

Learning a language is more than learning its vocabulary and grammar. For example, compared with English, Spanish uses many more path verbs such as "ascender" ("to move upward") and "salir" ("to go out"), and expresses manner of motion optionally. English, in contrast, has many manner verbs (e.g., "run,…

Muysken argues for four general "strategies" that characterize language contact phenomena across several levels of description. These strategies are (A) maximize structural coherence of the first language (L1); (B) maximize structural coherence of the second language (L2); (C) match between L1 and L2 patterns where possible; and (D) use…

This study investigated second language (L2) learners' acquisition of English /t, d/ deletion patterns in word-final consonant clusters, (a) focusing on how constraints such as grammatical conditioning and phonological environment affect deletion of /t, d/ in L2 acquisition and (b) determining the extent to which these L2 learners had acquired…

This article is divided into two parts. Part 1 focuses on the events that took place in teaching the class as a whole. Part 2 presents a case study of five learners who, because they had serious problems, both attitudinal and other problems, received special attention and additional support. The study had two main aims. The first was to respond to…

Despite anecdotal data on lexical interference among the languages of multilingual speakers, little research evidence about the lexical connections among multilinguals' languages exists to date. In the present paper, two experiments with a multilingual speaker who had suffered aphasia are reported. The first experiment provides data about…

Explains three elements of English that are particularly difficult for Chinese students to learn: the use of articles, which has no equivalent in Chinese; expression of tense, for which there is no Chinese equivalent; and the concepts of time, locality, and direction inherent in English usage of prepositions. (MSE)

This article makes two points about foreign language: (1) proper pronunciation is indispensable to initial accuracy and comprehension, as well as to later study of literature and culture; and (2) the best approach to pronunciation is based on the native language as a contrastive model. Taking as an example the learning of German by…

This paper describes a preliminary study which focuses on the syllable structure of interlanguage and begins to identify some of the processes which shape that interlanguage. Adults learning English as a second language in a formal classroom situation were recorded as they described a series of pictures in English. Two subjects were native…

Explores the possibility of establishing predictability models for interference as well as ascertaining the degree of competence adult second language learners could achieve before being able to eliminate interference in production of the target language. (CB)

The term ethnoreconstruction has been coined to refer to a strategy by which a speaker of one language or dialect attempts to speak a related language or dialect by systematically transforming the elements. The process is discussed with reference to several languages. (CHK)