This article uses cognitive measures previously developed within linguistic relativity research to explore the thinking patterns of Yucatec Maya-Spanish bilingual children in the Yucatan peninsula. These measures were designed to detect cognitive patterns associated with specific language patterns. Here, these measures are used to test whether 12…

The Pueblo People of the Southwest face numerous challenges with reference to language issues. A substantial number of Native American students are placed into special education possibly due to different linguistic abilities. The over-identification of Native American students for special education programs may be due to the lack of knowledge as a…

To understand the interactions between production patterns common to children regardless of language environment and the early appearance of production effects based on perceptual learning from the ambient language requires the study of languages with diverse phonological properties. Few studies have evaluated early phonological acquisition…

Few studies ethnographically detail how Indigenous young people's mobility intersects with sociolinguistic transformation in an interconnected world. Drawing on a decade-long study of youth and language contact, I analyze Yup'ik young people's migration in relation to emerging language ideologies and patterns of language use in "Piniq,"…

The Aymara of the Andes use absolute (cardinal) frames of reference for describing the relative position of ordinary objects. However, rather than encoding them in available absolute lexemes, they do it in lexemes that are intrinsic to the body: "nayra" ("front") and "qhipa" ("back"), denoting east and west,…

Metalinguistic skills may develop differently in multilingual and monolingual children. This study investigated effects of immersion in Cherokee as a second language on young children's (4;5-6;1) skills of noticing morphological forms/patterns in English, their first language, by comparing English past tense skills on two nonword and two real-word…

Examines Kamsa ritual language and describes a model (based on accessibility, formalization, and efficacy) for specifying its semiotic constitution. (EKN)

Analyzes samples of American Indian oral narrative forms to demonstrate that patterning in the narrative structure (such as systematic recurrence of lines) may embody an explicit logic of experience and rhetoric of action. Suggests that patterning occurs in the language of any community, a fact that has implications for teaching language to…

Kutenai has an obviation system reminiscent of the systems found in Algonquian languages, in which at most one third person nominal in a clause is proximate and others are obviate. Although the behavior of proximate nominals within clauses and within texts reflects a special status for proximates as having some sort of "higher rank" than…

Language decline in many immigrant and ethnic communities is always a persistent problem in America. To prevent Native tribal languages from becoming obliterated, several organizations have been founded to document and teach Indigenous languages, a number of tribes have crafted ambitious language policies, and Congress approved the Native American…

The Bella Coola suffix "-m" has been analyzed in the literature as two or even three separate morphemes, based on the variable effects it has on the transitivity of its base. The segment is argued for here as a single morpheme with a unified meaning, specifically as a marker of a special case of one definition of the middle voice,…

Offers a sustained linguistic analysis of James Fenimore Cooper's "The Last of the Mohicans." Finds that, because Cooper's technical blunders and moral limitations are always in view, they are revelatory. Suggests that no American author has gotten more things wrong about languages; but no one has dramatized more about how languages…

Examines the challenge posed by the naturalist philosophy of language--the view that the meanings of symbols are fixed by the environment. Compares the naturalist philosophy with that presented in an activist Native American essay that argues for the preservation of traditional native languages. (SRT)

A salient characteristic of the morpho-lexical systems of the Salish languages is the widespread use of reduplication in both derivational and inflectional functions. Salish reduplication signals such typologically common categories as "distributive/plural,""repetitive/continuative," and "diminutive," the cross-linguistically marked but typically…

As part of a training program for Native Americans in speech and hearing sciences, University of Arizona speech-language pathologists conducted speech-language screenings of 583 Papago Indian Reservation children. This report presents screening results, describes patterns of English usage among this population and discusses the differentiation of…