Investigates differential item functioning (DIF) across two different broad language groupings, Asian and European, in a speaking test in which the test takers' responses were rated polytomously. Data were collected from 1038 nonnative speakers of English from France, Hong Kong, Japan, Spain, Switzerland, and Thailand who took the SPEAK test in…

Draws a parallel between the passage and implementation of a law requiring that English be the primary language of instruction in California and the case of whether to use sign language or English as the primary language of instruction for Deaf and hard of hearing learners in English-speaking countries. (Author/VW)

Predictions were formulated for extended Optional Infinitives (OIs) stage in German-speaking children with specific language impairment and evaluated in clinical sample of 8 SLI German-speaking children, ages 4; 0 to 4; 8; and control group of 8 younger utterance-equivalent children, ages 2; 1 to 2; 7. Samples reveal that affected group more…

Presents the theoretical foundation and overall organization of a new methodological approach--the script-based approach--to teaching early oral production in the English-as-a-Foreign-language classroom. One goal of the approach is to turn monolingual speakers into individuals who can use the basic grammatical system. (Author/VWL)

Investigates the differential effects of three conditions--nonegotiated, premodified input, negotiation without "pushed output, and negotiation plus pushed output--on second language (L2) learners vocabulary comprehension and acquisition (receptive and productive). Findings of the study provide empirical evidence for the important role of…

Considers how, when children enter school speaking a social class dialect, it can pose problems for both the students and the teachers. Notes strategies that teachers might use to assist the Black dialect speaker to adopt a more "prestigious dialect." Suggests teachers provide opportunities to listen to folktales or riddles written in dialect and…

Research on negotiation has focused thus far on oral conversation and interaction. The study discussed here expands on this line of research by investigating whether learners engage in negotiation when exchanging ideas in synchronous computer-mediated interaction. (Author/VWL)

Reviews recent research on crosslinguistic variation. Suggests that lexical systems are as notable for their differences as they are for their similarities. (Author/VWL)

Three experiments assessed the extent to which statistical learning generates novel word-like units, rather than probabilistically-related strings of sounds. Found that 8-month-olds' listening preferences were affected by the context (English versus nonsense) in which items from the familiarization phase were embedded during testing. Confirmed…

Examined characteristics of the acoustic signature of languages in connection with identification of the target language, Korean. In one experiment, listeners were asked to distinguish spoken samples of Korean from competitor languages sharing syllable based rhythm. In another, listeners attempted to distinguish Korean from languages spoken in the…

Writing and speaking are clearly related activities, but the acts of production are different. To what extent are the underlying processes shared? This paper reports three experiments that use syntactic priming to investigate whether writing and speaking use the same mechanisms to construct syntactic form. People tended to repeat syntactic form…

The interactions of 24-, 30-, and 36-month-old children and their mothers reading two initially unfamiliar books were observed three times over a 2-week period. Coding characterized both the content and the role of their utterances as they discussed the stories. Utterance content depended on child age but changed little with increasing story…

In order to study the role of working memory in sentence formulation, we elicited errors of subject-verb agreement in spoken sentence completion, while speakers did or did not maintain an extrinsic memory load (a word list). We compared participants with low and high speaking spans (a measure of verbal working memory for sentence production). As…

The terms "fortis" and "lenis" are variously regarded as having one single underlying phonetic correlate or many. An exploratory analysis of acoustic and aerodynamic data on contrasting stop series in a number of European and non-European languages confirms that a significant variation in peak intra-oral pressure and in articulatory stricture…

This article describes the predicative verbal system of Catalan Sign Language (LSC) as it is used by Deaf people in the province of Barcelona. We also present a historical perspective of the research on this topic, which provides insight into the changes that have taken place over the last few decades in sign language linguistics. The principal…