Describes a study that explores whether less fluent non-native listeners attend more to syntactic than to semantic cues by testing three groups: native English-speakers and advanced and intermediate non-natives. Results show that semantically acceptable responses increased progressively for intermediate, advanced, and native groups, while…

Discusses the differences between the English native and nonnative speaker's creation and use of nominal compounds. A comparison between English speakers and Japanese native speakers indicates that not only must nonnative speakers acquire rules in order to effectively compound words in English, but that rules must indeed exist, indicating that…

Describes a sequence of four studies that explored how people composed sentences while writing expository essays. Among the findings were that the sentence composition process was often guided by a writing plan, and the most frequent changes accomplished by revision of parts were word choice, aspect of meaning, and grammatical structure. (HOD)

Three critics comment on weaknesses in Louis G. Ceci's September 1983 "College English" article, "The Case for Syntactic Imagery," and Ceci responds. (CRH)

Suggests structure based on two sets of principles for deriving meaning from data: Shannon's measure of entropy, which provides means of measuring amount of information in message; and Ranganathan's faceted classification scheme, which provides means of determining number of meaningful data. Syntax, meaning, and semantics of data are discussed.…

Reports on a study that examined the development of audience-adapted writing skills between the end of elementary school and the beginning of college, concluding that all students demonstrated sensitivity to the needs of a young reader. (HOD)

Discusses the current approaches to interlanguage syntax, focusing on the goal of finding consistency and pattern in syntactic variation. Some themes contributing to descriptive approaches include: the transition from morphosyntax acquisition studies to those of more complex syntax, the emergence of syntax from discourse, explicitness, and the…

Discusses physiological, psychological, and social effects of speed of articulation and introduction of both productive and receptive fast-talk exercises at early stages of language learning. By helping English as a second language students with the phonological, functional, semantic, and syntactic components of English, students move closer to…

Discusses the use and syntax of the adjective in French. (Text is in French.) (CLK)

Proposes an analysis of the impersonal sentence in Russian based on the Fillmorian case grammar model and intended for use in second language instruction. (CHK)

Recent attempts to classify the meanings of two-word utterances expressed by young children have assumed that children always intend one of the meanings adults might express. This paper challenges that assumption and suggests an alternative approach to determining the meaning of these utterances. (Author/RM)

Describes a project designed to investigate the use of computer-aided instruction in the teaching of French syntax. (CLK)

Grammatical description that relates structure to language use can help the EFL teacher in cases where different interpretations of experience are expressed in English and the students' native language by, for example, clauses that are structurally identical. (Author/RM)

The study of speech errors, or "slips of the tongue," is a time-honored methodology which serves as a window to the representation and processing of language and has proven to be the most reliable source of data for building theories of speech production planning. However, until "Kids' Slips," there has never been a corpus of such errors from…