Offers a series of reflections on the theoretical bases of language teaching viewed from the perspective of the New Technologies (NT), and proposes a reconfiguration of the pedagogical triangle. In light of the tremendous impact of NT, different ways of treating the four language skills in traditional and virtual environments are considered.…

Publishes the results of an annual survey of Doctoral degrees granted in foreign languages, literatures, cultures, linguistics, and foreign language education in the United States. (Author/VWL)

Assessed the amount of linguistic information needed by 2-year-old infants to recognize whether or not a sentence belongs to their native language. A cross-linguistic study of French and American 2-month-old infants was conducted, measuring the latency of the first ocular saccade toward a loudspeaker playing short French and English utterances.…

Investigated the effects of pragmatic constraints on the acquisition of the binding of English reflexives by adult Turkish second-language learners. Pragmatically-biased and pragmatically-neutral sentences were compared to determine whether pragmatic bias towards a non-local antecedent overrides the parameter setting of English and causes learners…

Four experimental studies were designed to test, in Norwegian, the hypothesis that children's non-adultlike interpretations of pronouns may be partly attributable to a lexical factor interacting with the A-Chain Condition. (Author/VWL)

Argues that applied linguistics, as the interdisciplinary field that mediates between the theory and practice of language acquisition and use, is the overarching field that includes second language acquisition (SLA) and SLA-related domains of research. (Author/VWL)

Focuses on the current linguistic trends in libraries where use of jargon borrowed from business and computer technology is jeopardizing humanistic expression. Discusses common characteristics of the specialized language; levels of library jargon and obscure language; the danger of specialization to the future of libraries; influences from other…

Provides a quantitative analysis of the behavior of nouns in two generations of speakers from a bilingual community in Northern Cyprus. Findings demonstrate that empirical investigation can disambiguate the community-specific status of language contact phenomena. (Author/VWL)

Argues for novel conceptualization of the learning process in language acquisition. According to this proposal, the learning procedure is neither purely lexical learning nor purely inductive rule-formation, but rather a hybrid of the two. Investigated the first intransitive verbs to participate in multiword combinations in a longitudinal study of…

Examines development of verb structures in the multiword combinations of two Korean learners, starting from 15 months of age when both children produced their first word combination. (Author/VWL)

Recent advances in cross-language psycholinguistics provide reading researchers with both the models and the tools needed to investigate the syntactic processing of second-language (L2) readers. In this study, 48 first-language and 48 highly fluent L2 French readers read sentences containing constructions that do not exist in English, pre-verbal…

Examines ways in which Noah Webster's linguistic theories and work on dictionaries influenced North American English lexicography, arguing that his impact on American education was great because his spellers and dictionaries monopolized a rapidly growing market, and influence on lexicography was substantial because he insisted on the validity of…

Examines why the French verb of motion "passer" is used so much more widely in French than its English cognate "pass" is in English and identifies features of "passer" that distinguish it from similar motion verbs in French, concluding that the key is its relatively neutral semantic content. English avoids the…

Explores how some contemporary language usage presents challenges for technical editing and how awareness of language theory can help students expand their context for (and critically assess) current editing textbook advice on language choice. Discusses what editors and teachers of editing can do to help produce technical documents that address…

Three hypotheses of second-language learning (Interference Hypothesis, Input Hypothesis, Fundamental Difference Hypothesis) are applied to the case of Polish-born English novelist Joseph Conrad, to see how well they explain his language learning. The first two hypotheses fail to explain adequately his mastery of written English, whereas the last…