Matching of students and teachers on the basis of race did not improve student performance, but students of black teachers with less than five years' experience were found to have better vocabulary achievement than students of white teachers with similar experience. (MM)

Discusses the language problems in Roch Carrier's French Canadian short stories, as well as his concise, nostalgic writing style. The article gives examples of vocabulary in his characters' dialogue; reviews the evolvement of French in Quebec and the question of "joual," in particular; and focuses on expressions posing difficulty for…

Examined continuity in 94 children's vocalization and language development. Acquired data from parent reports of children's vocal and lexical development from 14 to 18 months, and from language development scales administered at 18 months. Found that early vocalizers comprehended and produced more words and suffixes than late vocalizers, and that…

Compares the acquisition of vocabulary by Dutch advanced students of French reading a French story in one of three text reading conditions: marginal glosses; dictionary; or control. Results indicate that frequency of word occurrence fosters incidental vocabulary learning more when the first two conditions exist. (40 references) (Author/CK)

Six preschool children, mostly from poverty-level backgrounds, were taught to make descriptive statements about objects. The category-descriptor statements were organized and sequenced into four clusters. As sets of new statements were successively taught and evaluated, the number and diversity of probed category and descriptor terms steadily and…

Argues that abstract, figurative senses of polysemous words are better retained when learners are given core senses as cues, because providing a core sense helps learners develop a "precise elaboration." Results of a series of vocabulary studies involving Dutch learners of English show that providing a core sense results in better guessing and…

Examines the CDI-WORDS Short Form vocabulary checklist as an index of language production. The study focuses on the associations between this short form and directly observed measures of lexical production; the associations between short-form checklists administered at different ages; the predictive associations between short form scores and…

Examined the use of the mutual exclusivity constraint in naming objects among young children monolingual in English or bilingual in English/Urdu or in English/Greek. The study used three tests of the constraint: disambiguation, rejection and restriction. Findings revealed that bilingual children used the constraint to a lesser extent than…

Tests Pine & Lieven's (1993) suggestion that a lexically-based positional analysis can account for the structure of a considerable proportion of children's early multiword corpora. Results reveal that the positional analysis accounts for 60% of the children's multiword utterances and that most other utterances are defined as frozen. (33…

Looks at the ways grammar and vocabulary are interconnected and suggests some implications for language teaching. Suggests that language teachers focus on word patterns to encourage four aspects of language learning: understanding, accuracy, fluency, and flexibility. (four references) (Author/CK)

Examined longitudinally the handshape aspect of American Sign Language signs in young children of deaf parents. Parents demonstrated on videotape how the children formed the different signs. Findings reveal that four basic handshapes predominated in early sign production, and that the part of the hand involved in contacting a sign's location often…

Examined the strength of the association between language exposure estimates and vocabulary learning for simultaneous bilingual infants with differing patterns of exposure to the languages being learned. Findings revealed that the correlation was strong, even for children whose language environments changed by more than 20% between observations.…

Reports on the exploratory phase of a computer assisted language learning project designed to provide a package enabling students of German as a second language to develop their reading and writing skills, learn new vocabulary and syntactical structure, and enhance their competence in the production of text commentary. (Six references) (Author/CK)

Presents a critical review of current empirical second-language (L2) studies addressing the effects of simplification on L2 learners' comprehension and intake in the written and aural modes. Argues that the issue of the role and effects of simplification on learners' comprehension and intake remains contentious. (35 references) (Author/CK)

Evaluates two developmental models incorporating innovations in prosodic theory using the phonological forms of one child's vocabulary documented for the first nine months of language production. Results indicate the relevance of the prosodic hierarchy in the early grammar as well as considerable early knowledge of prosodic structure below the…