Discusses a study on the untutored acquisition of possessive constructions in Dutch by two Turkish and two Moroccan adults during the first three years of their stay in the Netherlands. The focus is on the order of the owner and the possession in possessive constructions. (28 references) (JL)

Studied "pre-ambiguity" plausibility information, information about verb argument structure frequencies, and "post-ambiguity" constraints in undergraduates. All three types of constraints were helpful in the resolution of ambiguities. Ambiguity resolution becomes more difficult as the competitor interpretations becomes stronger. Study items are…

Investigates the determinants of adult usage of various syntactic and semantic cues in sentence interpretation. Native French speakers and advanced English/French bilinguals were tested for the strength of usage of word order, clitic pronoun agreement, verb agreement, and noun animacy cues in the assignment of the role in French sentences. (46…

In a study of knowledge activation and sentence mapping, subjects read stories that described concrete actions, and then the content of the stories was manipulated (i.e. stories were written that implied different emotional states). It is suggested that the more emotionally evoking situations one encounters the more memory traces are stored and…

Investigations of Japanese speakers' interlanguage constructions of English existential sentences with a locative sentential topic found a general shift from topic-comment to subject-predicate structures as proficiency increased. (24 references) (Author/CB)

For better comprehension and more communicative production among francophones, students of French should be taught the use and function of detached phrases as they are used in popular spoken French. A specific approach distinguishing between appropriate spoken and written usage is outlined. (20 references) (MSE)

Provides a new perspective on whether there is a correlation between finiteness and verb placement in second language acquisition by analyzing data from speakers of Romance languages learning German as a second language. Verbs are classified as thematic and nonthematic and analyzed with respect to overt subject-verb agreement and verb placement as…

Describes two grammaticality judgment tasks--one in French and one in English--developed based on differences between the two languages vis-a-vis middle constructions. The tasks were administered to Anglopone and Francophone advanced and very advanced learners of their second language, and to unilingual groups with the same first languages.…

Explores the possibility that particular properties of how number words are used within sentences inform children of the semantic class to which they belong. Analysis of transcripts of the spontaneous speech of three children and their parents suggests that the relevant cues are available as input in parents' speech to children and that children…

Attempts to use a construct of literary theory to solve a linguistic problem: the notion of narrative perspective to explain tense variation in Bulgarian narrative. The specific phenomenon of variation is between the past indefinite and the indirect tenses in passages where all the verb forms should be indirect. (24 references) (Author/CK)

Presents a study of the spontaneous pre-sentential negations of preschool English-speaking children that supports the hypothesis that child English nonanaphoric pre-sentential negation is a form of metalinguistic exclamatory sentence negation. A detailed discourse analysis reveals these child negations as echoic and expressive of objection and…

Compared two Arabic stories and their English translations and two Arabic and English stories with reference to sentence organization, coordination, and subordination. Showed that Arabic and English sentences are differently organized, coordination is more common in Arabic than in English, while subordination is more frequent in English than in…

Examines sentence matching, a methodology frequently used in the second language literature to determine notions of grammaticality of nonnative speakers. Native speakers of French and second language learners of French performed a sentence-matching task focusing on three areas of French grammar: adverb placement, subject-verb agreement, and…

Presents a text summarization system and examines its validity by comparing automatically generated summaries with human-generated ones. Examines the accuracy of the system by evaluating the representativeness of cue verbs and basic sentence patterns, as well as the essential information in a summary. Also analyzes syntactic and semantic errors of…

Measures of sentence recall and past tense marking were used to examine the similarities and differences between children with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), children with specific language impairment (SLI), and typically developing (TD) children. Both SLI and ADHD group means for sentence recall tasks were significantly lower…