Based on previous research showing five examples of verb reduplication in Majang, a member of the Nilo-Saharan language family, this paper presents more specific examples of verb reduplication, its different uses, and the phonological rules governing it. Examples of possibly reduplicated forms from other parts of speech are also given, and data…

Instructional materials for the preterite tense in Spanish are based on Robert Terry's technique of using familiar stories in the foreign language, written in the present tense, which students must place in the past by changing verb forms. The objective is to avoid the disadvantages of simply translating verb tenses and to allow the student to get…

Instructional materials for the passe compose and imperfect tenses in French use the technique of presenting familiar stories in the foreign language, written in the present tense, which students must place in the past by changing verb forms. The objective is to avoid the disadvantages of simply translating verb tenses and to allow the student to…

A study explored the acquisition of word schemas, that is, implicit knowledge about patterns of word meaning in English which constrain the hypotheses that proficient word learners make about new words they encounter. Subjects, 42 seventh-grade students and 37 tenth-grade students in a small rural community and 42 college undergraduates at a large…

An approach to the study of numeral quantifiers in Japanese reveals some fundamental properties of Japanese, especially those pertaining to movement. Using numeral quantifiers, a demonstration shows that the subject of unaccusative verbs in Japanese originates in the object position and moves to the subject position at S-structure. It is also…

This study examines quantitatively the systems of tense, mood, and aspect in Puerto Rican Spanish spoken in the United States. In the community under investigation, code-switching is an integral part of the communicative repertoire; also, the codes tend to be switched at points around which the surface structures of Spanish and English map onto…

The tendency for individuals to reduce their own efforts when others are available to respond has been called "social loafing." Social loafing has been found also to characterize collective endeavors on tasks considered cognitively efffortful. To test the hypothesis that reduced cognitive effort related to the presence of a coacting group would…

Two experiments were conducted on the use and combination of three cues that differentiate active from passive verbs: a form of the auxiliary "be," the morphology of the passive participle of the verb, and the case-making preposition "by." In the first experiment, 59 children aged 2.9 to 5.10 years were asked to interpret…

This study investigates how children learn not to overgeneralize about grammatical forms and how to reformulate hypotheses about the grammar of their language even when receiving little or no explicit feedback. Two proposals were looked at: (1) input monitoring theory stating that certain overgeneralizations are eliminated from production because…

An investigation of the language transfer in second language (L2) lexico-semantic development looked at the relationship of the level of L2 proficiency and interlingual patterns of lexico-semantic correspondence. The linguistic categories used were verbs and adjectives. Relative degrees of difficulty for L2 learners were determined for four…

A comparison is made between the modal verb systems of German and English with an emphasis on the interference caused by slight variations. (TL)

Linguistics as a science has been concerned with comparison ever since its inception, the number and variety of approaches increasing steadily in the course of its development. Interest in linguistic comparison extends into the field of foreign language teaching. Linguists have attempted to solve the problem of methodology in contrastive…

The difficulty with "le" involves some seeming inconsistencies in the formation of negatives and the identification of its functions. The suggested solution consists of explaining the use of the semantic properties of the verbs involved, co-occurrence restriction with negative markers, and the relative postion of "le" in the surface structure.…

Suggests several specific examples of ways in which one can teach from wall-pictures in ESL classes. The stages of teaching from these pictures are given as presentation, repetition, question and answer, and practice. (RM)