This brief paper presents a summary of a study which examined the developmental progression of categorization and its relationship to language development in 12 adults with severe to profound mental retardation and with less than 100 words of expressive language (including manual signs). Subjects were asked to sort physically eight miniature…

A system of classification for tellings and retellings by Panama's Kuna Indians reveals the dimensions of their structure and function, textually, contextually, strategically, and ethnographically. Kuna verbal life can be characterized in terms of three distinct ritual-ceremonial traditions marked by three distinct languages, settings, sets of…

Recent research indicates that fourteen linguistic and paralinguistic patterns--thought to measure uncertainty, vagueness, dependence, and negative affect--discriminate between men's truth telling and deceptive language behavior. This study sought to determine if these same patterns also discriminate between women's truth telling and deceptive…

A review of the literature on a variety of issues related to testing vocabulary knowledge in a second language addresses these topics: problems in estimating vocabulary size, including the related questions of what constitutes a word, how a sample should be selected, and what are the criteria for knowing a word; sampling the basic and specialized…