Discusses the relative merits of feature versus model based semantics for the interpretation of verb phrases in English, French, and German. The article concludes that the simplicity afforded by features is offset by the depth of analysis achieved with event models that are additionally able to support a sophisticated approach to machine…

Analysis of Chinese undergraduates' oral production of English lexical items they had already been exposed to found that factors affecting both placement and phonetic stress errors involved native language patterns, syllable structure, and the lexical item's position in the rhythmic sequence. (45 references) (CB)

Analysis of data derived from an earlier study of Japanese-English interlanguage shows that discourse-pragmatic markedness conditions on the subject position combine with central aspects of a configurational syntax in the generation of sentential forms, creating a module interface distinct from the native or second language. (38 references)…

This article examines the variable absence of the verb in "as far as" constructions, which serve as qualifiers or topic restrictors in English. (46 references) (Author/CK)

Discusses the suggestion that grammatical-specific language impairment (SLI) is characterized as a deficit affecting only feature-related aspects of grammar. The research reported here indicates a wider impairment involving aspects of grammar not determined by feature checking, in particular the structure of the verb phrase with resultative…

Describes a study that investigated the use of a natural language processing technique called noun phrasing to determine whether it is a viable technique for medical information retrieval. Evaluates four noun phrase generation tools for their ability to isolate noun phrases from medical journal abstracts, focusing on precision and recall.…

Proposes that an important role for connectionist research in language acquisition is analyzing what linguistic information is present in the child's input. Recent connectionist and statistical work analyzing the properties of real language corpora suggest a priori objections against the utility of distributional information are misguided. This…

In the present study we investigate sentence production in the German interlanguage of Turkish students who have learned German as a first and English as a second foreign language. The students know both languages at an (advanced) intermediate level. Nevertheless, we observed some properties of the German interlanguage that seem to indicate an…

To contribute to a better understanding of second language (L2) sentence processing, the present study examines how L2 learners parse temporarily ambiguous sentences containing relative clauses. Results are reported from both off-line and on-line experiments with three groups of advanced learners of Greek whose native languages (L1s) were Spanish,…

How would translators approach a process in which they have to make decisions on mapping the grammatically enforced regular number mechanism of a language such as English onto a system like Japanese, where there is no regular coding of number in a noun phrase? Utilizing the concepts of motivation for representation of number, and of "formal-shift"…

To what extent does Universal Grammar (UG) constrain second language (L2) acquisition? This is not only an empirical question, but one which is currently investigable. In this context, L2 acquisition is emerging as an important new domain of psycholinguistic research. Three logical possibilities have been articulated regarding the role of UG in L2…

The author is presenting a program that she designed for teaching liaison interpreting to translation students in their fifth semester of the translation program at the College of Languages and Translation (COLT), who are starting their training in liaison interpreting. The students never had any interpreting or translation training before. The…

A study investigated the role of pragmatics, the factors that govern choice of language in social interaction, on interpretation of elliptical verb phrases (VPs) in spoken English by learners of English as a Second Language (ESL). Ellipsis requires the listener to recall the surface form of a presupposed element and to integrate it into the…

A large segment of poor readers in elementary school do not supply prosodic features to print; in other words, they do not use pauses, changes in pitch, or differences in emphasis to show their comprehension. Two methods that help children to supply reading intonation involve using phrasally segmented texts and teacher modeling of the correct…

An analysis of languages with multiple fronting of WH words (who, what, whom, etc.) looks in detail at Polish, Serbo-Croatian, Czech, Bulgarian (Slavic languages), and Romanian (a Romance language). In spite of their superficial similarity, the Slavic and East European languages that normally put all WH words at the beginning of clauses fall into…