Examines comparable speech and writing samples in the British and American components of the International Corpus of English (ICE) to study properties of coordinate structures in English. Findings indicate that "and" is a primary coordinator, that "but" and "or" are more peripheral, and that the concept of…

Discussion of academic bibliographic instruction highlights an exercise in developing critical reading skills by reading and effectively reviewing ERIC abstracts. Topics include rhetoric and writing-based approaches in bibliographic instruction, sentence structure, text assessment, and automated bibliographic tools and interpreting text on a…

Native Spanish early and late acquirers of English and Vietnamese early and child acquirers of English made grammaticality judgments of sentences in their second language. Native acquirers of English were not distinguishable from native English speakers, whereas native Spanish late acquirers had difficulty with all aspects of the grammar tested…

Two experiments were conducted to determine whether a parser's on-line processes are affected by manipulation of case markings in Korean sentence processing, and to evaluate the usefulness of a Ranked Flagged Serial Parser model in predicting Korean ambiguity resolution processes. (Author/VWL)

We examine how attention to animacy information may contribute to children's developing knowledge of language. This research extends beyond prior research in that children were shown dynamic events with novel entities, and were asked not only to comprehend sentences but to use sentence structure to infer the meaning of a new word. In a 4 x 3…

The authors of this article report on a preliminary study of 18, 4- and 5-year-old children, followed by a longitudinal study of 44 children, who were tested in the first, second, and third grades. The children's ability to detect the ambiguity of lexically ambiguous sentences (e. g., "The children saw the bat lying by the fence") and…

Explores how the story "The Raja's Big Ears" traveled from Gujerat in India, where it is a well-known folktale, via a skilled story teller, to London, where it was transformed through contact with the multicultural world of London school children. (Author/VWL)

Economic forecasting in the world of international finance confronts economists with challenging cross-cultural writing tasks. Producing forecasts in English which convey confidence and credibility entails an understanding of linguistic conventions which typify the genre. A typical linguistic feature of commercial economic forecasts produced by…

This study focused on Japanese linguistic features that contribute to producing the paragraph-length and extended connected discourse that is expected at the Advanced and Superior levels in ACTFL oral proficiency interviews (OPIs). From 15 Japanese OPIs at the Intermediate-High through Superior levels, 3,062 predicates were identified. Frequent…

The grammatical phenomenon in Japanese known as Ga-No conversion is examined. In this phenomenon, the nominative particle "ga" can be converted to genitive particle "no" in embedded sentences with a nominal head such as a relative clause or complementary clause. A pragmatic constraint to this conversion that has not previously been explored is…

Has the new emphasis on process versus product led instructors to teach that the writing process is everything and the product, the finished paper, of no import? This is a lesson that not even the most orthodox believer in writing process methodology would support. The process and the product are, in fact, mutually linked, rather than mutually…

A discussion of Bolanci (also Bole or Bolewa), a West Chadic language spoken in northeastern Nigeria, focuses on one component of the system of complementation, the form "na." This form has an inherent semantic capable of influencing the meaning of sentences in which it is embedded, specifically, when present in a complex sentence,…

The purpose of this study was to explore the effects on college students of audiotaping classroom assignments. As part of their course requirements, students were asked to submit both a hard copy of their work plus an audiotape containing their assignments. During a 3-year period, 231 undergraduate education majors enrolled in 12 courses at 3…

This paper introduces a procedure for analyzing sentential themes and demonstrates how it may be useful to students when they consider the effectiveness of their own sentences in the process of revising a piece of writing. The paper shows that, by analyzing sentential themes and their function in academic writing, students can learn to perform the…

This report discusses the stress patterns of Bengali as spoken in Bangladesh. One of the findings indicate that every word has stress in the first syllable, with additional stress in the first syllable of the first word of the phrase. The Bengali language does not have penultimate and antepenultimate stress. Because there is no rule for changing…