Volume 43, Issue 2 -

The Relationship Between Phonological Awareness and Word Reading This study investigates the effect of phonological awareness instruction on the development of word-reading ability for EFL first-graders in a Jordanian state school. Based on Chard and Dickson's (1999) phonological awareness hierarchy, a phonological awareness training program was developed by the researchers, and used in training the experimental group whose children after 10 training sessions significantly outperformed their peers in the control group on TampaReads' (2003) word-reading measures. The study concludes that phonological awareness is relevant to the development of first-graders' word-reading ability, and that explicit phonological awareness instruction is essential for this development. The study thus provides support to previous research, and implies that phonological awareness can be taught contrary to the notion of the pure whole language approach, and that explicit phonological awareness intervention can help overcome the Jordanian EFL children's reading problems once it is systematically integrated into their school curricula.

Syllable Structure of Ukrainian. An Ot Perspective This paper aims at presenting an OT account of the basic syllable structure of Ukrainian. Among the specifically Ukrainian syllable-driven processes that are considered are onset maximisation, prothesis, voice assimilation, as well as the behaviour of clusters of obstruents agreeing and disagreeing in voicing, sonority plateaus and extrasyllabic sonorants. Optimality Theory is shown to successfully handle dialectal variation in the application of prothesis, as well as the transparency effects in voice assimilation.

Phonology In Text Messages Text messages operate on a protocol which allows from 148 to 160 characters per message, including spaces between words. In such a highly circumscribed environment, writing is seriously hampered by the limited space and the usage of the numeric phone keypad. Thus, the advent of a new quality of the text language, sometimes referred to as "textese", was inevitable under those conditions. One of the characteristics of text messages is frequent deletion of letters in orthographical forms, like in the following example: IfYaMthWozNEBiGrUWdntHavNEFAcLft2Wsh (if your mouth was any bigger you wouldn't have anything else left to wash ). In order to investigate the nature of letter deletions in text messages a study was undertaken, which analyzed ten examples of text messages coming from various sources. The aim of the study was to determine whether the deletion of letters was regular, the general prediction being that text messages are decoded via the mediation of their phonemic representations (or via mental reading). It was speculated that the regularities were governed by phonological principles such as the semiotic "figure and ground" principle (Dressler 1996) and the "rich-get-richer" principle (Donegan 1978/1985). The results demonstrate that phonology is very likely to govern reductions albeit without any recourse to the prosody level. More specifically, phonology apparently affects the pattern of deletions in text messages, whereas there is a marked tendency that stress assignment does not determine the nature of deletions.

A Typology of the Ground of Deictic Motion Verbs As Path-Conflating Verbs: the Speaker, the Addressee, and Beyond This paper examines typical deictic motion verbs come and go in different languages, Chinese, English, German, Japanese, Korean, and Shibe, as well as other languages in the literature, using Talmy's framework for analyzing motion verbs. While his framework makes it possible to analyze and compare the lexical semantics of deictic motion verbs viewed as Path-conflating verbs, the actual characterization of the Ground, i.e. the deictic center, is far more complicated than suggested by Talmy: "toward the location of the speaker". The analysis of deictic motion verbs in various languages reveals that there is a cross-classified hierarchy among the elements which constitute the Ground: all languages take the location of the speaker at the utterance time as the deictic center while, in addition, the location of the addressee and/or the reference time locations play the role of the deictic center in some languages. Furthermore, it is shown that the Ground of the deictic motion verbs is relativized in some languages to the referent of a particular sentence element such as the subject of the matrix subject, rather than being anchored to the participants of the speech act, which are usually considered to determine the deictic center.

Compensatory Strategies in Arabic as a Second Language This paper investigates the compensatory strategies (CpSs) used in the oral discourse of second year students studying Arabic as a second language (ASL) in the Arabic Language Institute at King Saud University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The study examined the various strategies used by a sample of 24 male learners who were all high school graduates from 8 different countries (Russia, Kosovo, Senegal, Tajikistan, Pakistan, Benin, Malaysia and Ethiopia), speaking 8 different languages (Russian, Albanian, Wolof, Tajik, Urdu, French, Malay and Somali). To elicit the CpS use, the subjects were audio-recorded while performing two tasks: an interview and a role-play. The data were transcribed and analysed. The results showed that the subjects used a range of compensatory strategies in their oral production. Moreover, there were differences between the individual learners' strategies according to their native language. The findings of the study showed that ASL learners were risk-takers, and they expanded their limited linguistic resources to achieve their communicative goals. The findings of the present study suggest that strategic competence as reflected in the CpSs used by ASL learners should be integrated into the ASL curriculum.

English as a Mixed V2 Grammar: Synchronic Word Order Inconsistencies from the Perspective of First Language Acquisition This paper discusses some word order inconsistencies found in present-day English and argues that these may be explained by natural processes in first language acquisition. English is usually assumed to have lost its verb-second (V2) properties in the Middle English period, but the paper argues that English should be considered a mixed V2 grammar, as subject-auxiliary inversion is still a syntactic requirement in all questions and a type of inversion also marginally appears in certain declaratives (with informationally light verbs). Discussing word order variation across Germanic V2 languages as well as some acquisition data, the paper develops an approach to language acquisition and change which is based on micro-cues expressed in the input. This means that there are many types of V2 grammars, which distinguish between different clause types, patterns of information structure, and natural classes of categories. In this model, historical gradualism is seen as successive changes affecting one micro-cue at a time, and the mixed V2 property of English is considered to represent no exceptional case, simply a somewhat more restricted V2 grammar than that of the other Germanic languages.

Two Languages, Two Cultures, One Mind: A Study into Developmental Changes in the Students' View of Language As a Tool in Cross-Cultural Communication In this paper I report on the preliminary results of a longitudinal one-year study of students' progression from a low level of language awareness manifested in their superficial/intuitive use of language/languages to a higher level of language self-awareness manifested in their more controlled use of language. The data gathered for this study include four sources: a language awareness questionnaire, think aloud protocols, error analysis and post error analysis in-class discussions. The results of this study are intended to be further explored in a larger research project.

On Certain Consequences of Feature Spread in Phase-Based Syntax 1 The paper presents some empirical consequences resulting from the application of Chomsky's phase-based system (Chomsky 2005, 2006) and, specifically, the implementation of feature spread between phase heads (C, v) and their complements (T, V), respectively. We begin with a brief overview of the "old" rules for the syntactic derivation and proceed with the description of the innovative concept of feature spread and the way it modifies the derivational process. Next, we hint at some problematic areas for the new system, i.e. extraction from the subject as well as that trace phenomenon. As for the former, we present, based on the comparison of the behaviour of raising as well as control verbs (including, among others, raising and control constructions), some evidence for the theory of Control as movement. What follows, we derive a parametrised version of Subject Condition. Finally, we look at certain facts from Polish (e.g. Genitive of Negation) that seem to lend credibility to the feature spread analysis.

Review