From incorporation into the Russian Empire in 1828, through the collapse of the U.S.S.R. in 1991 governmental language policies and other socio/political forces influenced the Turkic population of the Republic of Azerbaijan to speak Russian. Even with changes since independence Russian use--including various kinds of code-switching and…

This paper investigates the development of referring expressions in the narratives of children learning English as a second language (L2). Spoken narratives in English were elicited from sixty Chinese-speaking participants at four ages--five, eight, ten, and young adults--using the wordless picture book "Frog, where are you?" (Mayer, 1969).…

This study reports on student initiated attention to form within the collaborative construction of a wiki among pre-service Non-Native Speaker (NNS) English teachers. Forty NNS pre-service teachers from a large Mexican university were observed over a period of a sixteen week semester in an online content-based course aimed at improving their…

Two experiments investigated phonological, derivational-morphological and semantic aspects of grammatical gender assignment in a perception and a production task in German aphasic patients and age-matched controls. The agreement of a gender indicating adjective (feminine, masculine or neuter) and a noun was evaluated during perception in…

In this study we examined ERP (event-related-potential) responses in the morphosyntactic processing of subject-verb agreements by L2 Chinese learners of English. Fifteen proficient L2 learners and fifteen native English speakers were presented with English sentences that varied in the grammaticality of the sentence with respect to subject-verb…

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 in conjunction with the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act amendments of 2004 (IDEA) have created incentives to improve how K-12 instruction is provided and to improve the achievement of all students, including those with disabilities. To reach these goals, however, a thorough research base is needed,…

This paper describes an approach to teaching grammar which has been designed for school-aged children with specific language impairment (SLI). The approach uses shapes, colours and arrows to make the grammatical rules of English explicit. Evidence is presented which supports the use of this approach with older children in the areas of past tense…

Article omission is known to be a feature of early grammar, although it does not affect all child languages to the same extent. In this article we analyze the production of articles by 12 children, 4 speakers of Catalan, 4 speakers of Italian, and 4 speakers of Dutch. We consider the results in the light of (i) the adult input the children are…

In three experiments native speakers of Czech translated bare nouns and gender-marked adjective + noun phrases into German, their second language (L2). In Experiments 1-3 we explored the so-called gender interference effect from first language (L1) as observed in previous picture naming studies (naming latencies were longer when the L1 noun and…

The obligatory use of the preposition a with animate, specific direct objects in Spanish ("Juan conoce a Maria" "Juan knows Maria") is a well-known instance of Differential Object Marking (DOM; Torrego, 1998; Leonetti, 2004). Recent studies have documented the loss and/or incomplete acquisition of several grammatical features in Spanish heritage…

Using computers to help students practice and learn grammatical constructions goes back to the earliest days of computer-assisted language learning (CALL). With the coming of the Internet age, CALL began to focus more heavily on the new capabilities of group connectivity and computer-mediated communication. More recently, a gathering consensus has…

Analysis of the interaction of the grammatical and copulative aspects of the Spanish verbs "era,""estaba,""fue," and "estuvo" revealed that for most of the data obtained, copulative and grammatical aspect operate independently, with syntactic-semantic constraints selecting one copula and grammatical aspect…

In this paper the author contends that no useful results can be obtained if contrastive analysis is confined to formal correspondence: it is not enough to compare languages as to the presence or absence of corresponding systems and as to the similarities or dissimilarities in the distribution of the terms of the contrasted systems. Formal…

Homographs are defined in this study as sets of word forms which are spelled alike but which have entirely or partially different meanings and which may have different syntactic functions (that is, they belong to more than one form class or to more than one subclass of a form class). This report deals with the classification and identification of…

Multiple choice tests of preposition usage were given to 206 hearing-impaired adolescents. In general, they followed the predicted sequence but showed a greater ability to comprehend the manner of "grammatical" prepositions than would be expected. Three general principles for comprehension by deaf adolescents are proposed. (Author)