Focuses on language shift in a signed language in contact with the spoken language. Suggests that British Sign Language, under the influence of spoken English, has witnessed effects such as increased use of finger spelling as well as changes in lexical and function words that reflect spoken/written language structures. (Author/VWL)

Explores the phenomenon of post verbal alternation in English double object constructions and presents a statistical model for predicting the position of the indirect object in instances where alternation is unconstrained. The study includes analysis of a large set of written and oral American English data using a parametric multiple regression…

Investigates native speakers' (NS) perceptions of coherence and comprehensibility of nonnative speakers' writing and talk that lacks or misuses grammatical cohesive devices. NS readers of NNS texts with missing cohesive devices assumed coherence and imposed coherence on the text by adding grammatical cohesive devices missing in the original,…

Examines writing in Lithuanian, a language that has received little scholarly attention in the West and particularly the variety of Lithuanian used by the Lithuanian immigrant community in the United States. Examines articles from both Lithuanian and American Lithuanian newspapers to see how the written American variety differs from native norms…

Presents a survey of English-as-a-Second-Language students (n=142) for their preferences of writing prompt on essay tests and for other factors relating to their choices such as perceived difficulty of a topic. Findings reveal that these students, while not alert to potentially helpful syntactic clues in prompts, are probably using appropriate…

Presents an analytic foundation of English-as-a-Second-Language pedagogical research and application extending beyond the traditional "superficial" categories of morphosyntactic rule violations and false cognates. The study focuses on lexical-semantics, syntax, text-analysis, and pragmatics, and synthesizes major categories of…

Investigates the nature of cohesion, content, and grammar emergent in children's essays, with emphasis on understanding of cohesion and coherence. Conceptual definitions of these constructs are summarized into a picture-based narrative writing task for elicitation and scoring criteria for quantification. First and second graders from an immersion…