The distinction between teaching the grammatical system in a simplified form and teaching the ways to use it is applied to teaching scientific writing in English. The specific language features referred to are differences in meaning resulting from grammatical choices and appropriateness of grammatical alternatives in a specific context.…

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)

Two hypotheses were tested about how young children (four-to seven-year-olds) answer questions with the quantifiers "all" and "some": (1) that children use syntactic cues in determining which noun phrase is quantified, and (2) that children evaluate a some-statement as part of evaluating an all-statement. (Author/MP)

It was hypothesized that young children would have more trouble interpreting instructions given in the "Y because X" form than the "because X, Y." (SS)

Presents a contrastive study of connectives such as "in case that,""provided that," and "unless" focusing on the semantic properties of these items and their semantic and pragmatic equivalence across English and Italian. The article emphasizes that in its approach, pragmatic equivalence is strictly related to semantic…

A cross-modal priming task was used to investigate the role that a word's imageability and its form class play on the time-course with which word meanings are activated. Presents visual target words for lexical decision at different points through the duration of spoken primes. (Author/VWL)

Examination of the spontaneous speech of 10 English-speaking children (ages 3 to 5) with specific language impairment revealed evidence of the functional categories of determiner, inflection, and complementizer. However, compared to younger children with comparable mean utterance lengths, these children showed lower percentages of use of many…

Locally free reflexives in British English are analyzed as intensified nonnominative pronouns, subject to a contrastiveness requirement and a requirement that the character referred to be more central than other characters in the set. The extent to which discourse prominence marking can mimic locality marking may explain conversions of intensives…

In a discussion of grammatical identity of a Chinese word, the following topics are covered: word identification, word constituents, word properties, intraword structures, and interword constraints. (20 references) (LB)

Significant features of the official October 1990 orthographic reforms in French are outlined and their pedagogical implications are discussed briefly. The changes, primarily simplifications and not major changes, affect use of the hyphen, plurals, diacritical markings, verb tenses, and correction of anomalies. (MSE)

Various authors have shown the first person to play a key role in the construction of the writer's persona in research articles. This paper compares the use of first person in a corpus of biology articles produced by native English-speaking (NES) writers and a corpus of research article manuscripts produced by non-native English-speaking (NNES)…

This study examined the relation of visual self-recognition to personal pronoun use and pretend play. For a longitudinal sample (N66) at the ages when self-recognition was emerging (15, 18, and 21 months), self-recognition was related to personal pronoun use and pretend play such that children showing self-recognition used more personal pronouns…

In this experimental study, we focus on the following semantic universal: if a habitual clause reading, then generic pronominal subject; if an episodic clause reading, then specific pronominal subject. We argue that although this set of two conditionals is a universal property of all natural languages, English-speaking second-language (L2)…

In two experiments, naive participants took turns telling each other to click on a target picture while gaze was monitored. Critical trials included a "contrast" picture that differed from the target only in size. In both experiments, the timing of speakers' fixations on the contrast predicted whether the contrast was encoded in a phrase with a…

In this study, we tested the predictions of 2 opposing perspectives on the nature of the deficit in specific language impairment (SLI): the domain-general, cognitive/perceptual processing view and the domain-specific, linguistic representational view. Data consisted of spontaneous speech samples from French-English bilingual children with SLI;…