Discusses the theoretical implications of an experimental pilot study on the acquisition of word order properties in the French spoken by Dutch native speakers. Results provide support for the universal grammar approach to second-language acquisition. (Author/CB)

Examination of a second grade additive-bilingual (Spanish-immersion) classroom, compared to a monolingual classroom for nonverbal problem-solving and native-language development, found significant differences in problem solving in favor of the bilingual class and no significant differences in native-language development. (46 references) (Author/CB)

This study tested the hypothesis that children as young as two years use what adults tell them about meaning relations when making inferences about new words. Subjects (n=18) learned two new terms, with instructions to treat one term as superordinate to the other or replace one with the other, and with no instructions. Children used both kinds of…

A study investigated children's understanding of the formal and functional aspects of written Chinese in an orthographic acceptability judgment task and a creative spelling task. Subjects were 60 Hong Kong children ages 4 to 9. Results suggest that learning to read and write in Chinese is not accomplished by rote learning of characters but through…

Presents a longitudinal case study of a child with a phonological disorder. Demonstrates an asymmetrical pattern of consonant cluster development with two different reduction strategies. Argues that the child first represents all clusters as single underlying units, later representing only certain clusters as single units. Formulated within…

Examines kanji errors in handwriting of Japanese students and Australian learners of Japanese. Finds that Japanese students' phonologically-related kanji writing errors were most numerous, followed by orthographically-related errors and semantically-related errors; while Australian students wrote more non-existing kanji and made…

Used a cognitive neuropsychological approach to investigate a case of acquired dysgraphia in an adult who had sustained focal brain damage. The aims of the study were to investigate the usefulness of model-based assessment in identifying the mechanisms responsible for dysgraphia and for designing a treatment program informed by theories of normal…

Presents results from ongoing research about non-adapted language switches, highlighting a longitudinal study of an adult learner of third-language (L3) Swedish with first-language (L1) English and second-language (L2) German. The study is based on 844 non-adapted language switches. Researchers identified four types of switches. Results indicated…

Focuses on the role of context on the processing of inflected nouns in Finnish. Identification of partitive plurals with the homonymic suffix -jA was studied by presenting the target nouns in a sentence context and by recording durations of readers' eye fixations and self-paced reading times for these targets. Results are discussed. (Author/VWL)

A review of research on second language (L2) speech looks at four issues of process and product: whether speech is different from writing; whether oral discourse patterns differ from one language to another; whether L2 speaker oral skills differ significantly from native speakers'; and how L2 speech develops. (MSE)

The objective of this research is to exploit Chinese language processing techniques for temporal information extraction and concept reasoning. Outlines the characteristics of Chinese time system and temporal expressions. Discusses temporal knowledge representations. Presents a general framework for the storage and manipulation of temporal…

Argues that the possibility of working together unobserved on language learning tasks helps students to formulate and articulate their perceptions of how the linguistic structure of the foreign language functions. It is suggested that students' perceptions of how the computer helps them to learn the language can provide a blueprint for the…

Examines whether the "foreign language effect", that is, a temporary decline of thinking ability during foreign language processing, is larger when similarity between a foreign language and a native language is less. The results of two divided-attention experiments indicate that this effect was larger when the native tongue was less…

Presents two probe recognition experiments investigating whether overt and null pronouns in American Sign Language (ASL) similarly reactivate their referents during online sentence comprehension. Both experiments indicated that an important link exists between spatial verb agreement and the ASL pronomial system and that nonreferent inhibition does…

Describes a graphic modeling, natural language processing system, VerbalImage, which mimics features of human shape reasoning. Subjects read the same text description and were able to recognize the image generated by the computer from among a series of other computer-generated images. Performance on task was as good as for a control group…