A study of the signing of six deaf preschoolers found that they produced phonological and morphological errors, and semantic overgeneralizations, comparable to those made by hearing children when learning to speak. This suggests that deaf children actively construct sign language rules in the same way that hearing children build up the rules of…

This study of 15 Hebrew-speaking preschool children with specific language impairment and 2 comparison groups tentatively supported the notion that grammatical morphemes were less difficult for subjects if they take the form of stressed and/or lengthened syllables and if they appear in a language in which nouns, verbs, and adjectives must be…

Examined whether superior mathematics performance of students from Japan, Korea, and China may be due, in part, to differences in cognitive representation of number affected by Asian language features. Results suggested that the unique characteristics of the Asian number language system may facilitate the teaching and learning of mathematics,…

Spoken communication between residents (n=10; ages 12-21) and staff members in an institution for people with mental retardation was examined. Findings suggest that staff members and residents differed in their use of topics, with staff members talking primarily about instructional and behavior management topics and residents focusing mostly on…

Shows that the Scottish Vowel Length Rule supports Kiparsky's (1988) association of diffusing sound changes with lexical, and neogrammarian changes with postlexical rules, and to some extent, is a clearer illustration of Harris' (1989a: 55) notion of a phonological "life cycle" of changes and rules. (50 references) (GLR)

A study of the "silent period" in second-language learning focused on behavior of a 6-year-old Polish child shortly after immigration, in interaction with American children, bilingual Polish-American children, and another recent English-learner. Comparing play environments allowed identification of characteristics of interaction with…

Reports the investigation of the organizational structure of introductory sections of research papers written by Polish authors in English and Polish. The aim of the study was to test whether in view of cultural differences, reflected in the Anglo-American and Polish intellectual styles, the rhetorical pattern of research papers would vary between…

This article discusses issues related to selection and development of language assessment procedures for children who speak Spanish and English based on spontaneous language samples and shows how available procedures can be applied to research and clinical aims with these children. Sociolinguistic influences in Spanish-speaker language performance…

Examines ways in which modern varieties of English around the world differ in eight specific aspects of relative clause formation, focusing on the theoretical implications of some of the phenomena, their likely origins, and possible explanations for cases in which features are shared by apparently unassociated varieties. (Author/MSE)

Argues that some important aspects of listening as an interactive skill have been neglected in second-language teaching, including the receipt tokens "yeah,""mm hm," and "mm," and that such items should be taught as part of the development of conversational skills. Characteristics of these items' placement in talk sequences, prosodic shape, pause…

This study examined patterns of interaction in conversations between native speakers (NSs) and nonnative speakers (NNSs) of English among 48 NS-NNS dyads of elementary school students in Australia. Results found that NSs used negotiation strategies and recasts to provide negative feedback to their NNS peers. Contains 57 references. (MDM)

Investigated the mechanisms through which native-language (English) word decoding ability predicted individual differences in native- and second-language (Spanish) learning. Results are consistent with the hypothesis that second-language learning is founded on native-language phonological-orthographic ability among college-age adults, especially…

Reports on a research project conducted in Mauritius that aimed to investigate patterns of language use, language choice, and language attitudes of Mauritian adolescents in full-time education. Data was collected by means of a questionnaire and interviews from a sample of the secondary school population. (Author/VWL)

This investigation reports average length of communication units (C-units) in words and in morphemes for 95 African-American boys and girls (ages 4-6) from lower-income, urban homes. Mean C-units increased across the age span and syntactic complexity of the children's language samples correlated positively with increases in C-unit length.…

Presents evidence for four major design features of serial organization of speech arising from comparison of babbling and early speech with patterns in ten languages. Maintains that no explanation for the design features is available from Universal Grammar; except for intercyclical consonant repetition development, perceptual-motor learning seems…