Examines the potential of using data from interviews with second-language writers to explore ways in which writing differs between languages and cultures. Reports results of a study of 17 university staff and postgraduate students, all seasoned academic writers in both their mother tongue and English, who were interviewed about their understanding…

Clarifies the history and status of Macedonian in the various areas where it is spoken by providing a summary account of its history as a language of instruction in primary education in the Balkans from the nineteenth century to the present. (Author/VWL)

Investigates the relationship between focusing and coherence relations in pronoun comprehension. Examines a function of connectives: that of signaling coherence relations between two clauses. In three studies, coherence relations between sentence fragments ending in pronouns and participants' continuations to the fragments were identified.…

Investigates the relationship of third and fifth graders' awareness of the structure and meanings of derived words and the relationship of these forms of morphological awareness to word reading and reading comprehension. Shows that awareness of structure was significantly related to the ability to define morphologically complex words; some aspects…

Develops diagnostics for distinguishing word-internal codeswitching from borrowing, based on Ukrainian-English bilingual discourse: a typological different language pair. Focuses on conflict sites in the morphosyntactic structure of Ukrainian (a fusional language) and English (an analytical one). (Author/VWL)

A review of research on second-language writing looks at literature in four areas: research attempting to understand the norms and demands of writing; studies focusing on understanding students, their composing, and their texts; research on the functions of second-language writing instruction and classroom interaction between teacher and learner;…

Presents a distributed connectionist model of the perception of spoken words, employing speech representation that combines lexical and abstract phonological information, with lexical access as a direct mapping on this distributed representation. The article examines the integration of partial cues to phonological identity, showing that the model…

A study found that, when temporal characteristics of stops in a Spanish utterance by a native English-speaker were computer-manipulated, native Spanish-speakers' perceptions of the foreignness of the speech were affected. Results imply that Spanish language instruction should include instruction to shorten stops to more Spanish-like values,…

Three experiments investigated listeners' ability to detect disfluency in spontaneous speech. All three employed gated word recognition with judgments of disfluency for spontaneous utterances containing disfluencies and for three kinds of fluent control utterances from the same six speakers. (Author/JL)

Examines the use of contextual frames in a sample of essays from undergraduates at the University of Zimbabwe. The different structures used to frame claims are described, and their functions are discussed, with comments on their relative weakness. Conclusions are drawn about the main purposes for which students use contextual frames, and…

Attempts to reinterpret the threshold hypothesis, which states that low second language (L2) proficiency blocks the transfer of first language (L1) reading strategies to the reading of L2 texts. Results indicate that it is not only low foreign language proficiency but also text difficulty in terms of register complexity that negatively affect the…

Presents a framework for studying the effects of the Maturation Hypothesis on the problem of language learning, parametrically conceived, and offers a method for finding all existing maturational solutions for any parametric hypothesis space and any learning algorithm that differs from Gibson and Wexler's Triggering Learning Algorithm. (27…

Analyses of sentence combination data from 33 adult learners of English as a Second Language instructed in sentence combination tasks yielded inconclusive results as to whether implicational generalization (IG) is unidirectional to hierarchy levels implicated by the instructed level. The results suggest that IG is clearly not uniformly maximal to…

Discusses the application of pragmatic and discoursal principles to second-language acquisition (SLA). After critical examination of more traditionally oriented approaches, the article reanalyzes the process of SLA in an interactively oriented setting and applies the principle of "adjacency pair" to the context of SLA. The principle of…

A study examined the process of grammaticalization in American Sign Language, examining basic principles and patterns and drawing parallels with oral language. More advanced stages of grammaticalization (involving fusion and affecting syntax) are examined in depth, leading to proposal of a temporal-ordering analysis to explain sequencing of verbal…