A discourse analysis of videotaped teaching demonstrations by 18 Korean and Chinese teaching assistants reveals these non-native speakers of English lack the mastery of those cues, such as prosody and topicalization, that allow native speaker/listeners to perceive intended relationships among the ideas presented. (DJD)

Ninety students in grades six to eight listened to or read written passages and then identified and corrected grammar and syntax errors. Students listening and receiving auditory feedback located more errors than those reading. Learning-disabled students and students matched on reading level identified fewer errors than did students matched on…

Analysis of basilang speech (in terms of word order, reference to time, and reference to space) of Chinese, Spanish, and Japanese speakers of English as a second language indicated that oriental subjects tended not to use prepositions and that Spanish-speaking subjects tended to use "in" to express most locative meanings. (Author/CB)

Three studies assessing language comprehension of infants and toddlers through a method requiring a minimum of motor movement, no speech production, and differential visual fixation of two simultaneously presented video events provide insight into children's emerging linguistic capabilities and help resolve controversies about language production…

Explores (l) the role of pre-text in translating ideas into linguistic forms, and (2) the relationship of translating and pre-text in the planning and reviewing process. Suggests four observations worthy of further study concerning the nature and function of pre-text. (NH)

Identifies indicators of register or style in selected portions of two lectures presented in American Sign Language, and in the interpretations of each made by two interpreters. The indicators used are speaking rate, pausing, syntax, intonation, and lexical choice. Transcripts of data are included in Appendix. (Author/LMO)

Examines the theory of empty categories in a Government and Binding analysis of Modern Greek syntax. No empty subject category is found and so the pro-drop parameter is a misnomer here. Further support for the correlation between parametric variation and inflexional or morphological properties of a language is presented. (Author/LMO)

The performance of two sign language interpreters in interpreting and transliterating two English texts in 1973 and again in 1985 was analyzed. Both interpreters significantly increased their use of four linguistic features of American Sign Language: classifiers; rhetorical questions; noun-adjective word order; and nonmanual negation. (Author/CB)

Compares artificial intelligence and information retrieval paradigms for natural language understanding, reviews progress to date, and outlines the applicability of artificial intelligence to question answering systems. A list of principal artificial intelligence software for database front end systems is appended. (CLB)

Describes a study done to identify those syntactic structures that effectively communicate ideas in written German composition of fourth-semester students. Also identified were grammatical structures that writers can control on a syntactic level, but which they do not employ as a communicative strategy. (Author/SED)

Argues that while many publishers may simplify the sentence structure in the basal reader to facilitate the process of learning to read, this practice may result in texts with stylistic features and text formats that are unnatural and uncharacteristic of written English or the language development level of the children. (FL)

This collection of papers is divided into four sections. Section 1, "Historical Linguistics," includes "The Grammaticalization of Non-Dative Reflexes of Latin ill- in Spanish" (Jose R. Carrasquel) and "'Esto es Ligero de Fazer': Object to Subject Raising in Medieval and Early Modern Spanish" (Mark Davies). Section 2, "Language Acquisition and…

In Australian two-way immersion programs approximately 20-40% of instruction takes place in the target language. While much has been written about such programs targeting French and German, little has been written about Japanese immersion programs. The aim of this research is to provide a better understanding of children's second language…

Phrasal verbs occur frequently in written and spoken English and may be difficult for non-native speakers to understand and produce, particularly when parts of the phrasal verb should be separated and when they should be adjacent. The study reported here analyzes natural data in context to determine whether the word order of the parts of a…

Papers on typology and dialects of the Romani language include: "Athematic Morphology in Romani: The Borrowing of a Borrowing Pattern" (Peter Bakker); "Towards a Morphology-Based Typology of Romani" (Viktor Elsik); "The Typology of Case Relations and Case Layer Distribution in Romani" (Yaron Matras); "Object…