The paper provides a college mathematics student's concept maps, definitions, and essays to support the thesis that language-based prior knowledge can influence students' cognitive processes of mathematical concepts. A group of intermediate algebra students who displayed terms mainly from the spoken language on the first and the second concept…

Children's use of proforms in spoken descriptions of real situations was studied and compared with that of adults to explore possible developmental progressions in the use of indexical reference. A discourse distinction between situational and textual reference was applied to data from 6-year-old and 10-year-old children and from adults. Subjects…

This paper considers the process by which humans are able to select from the complex string of sounds impinging on the ear and understand certain frequency combinations to be linguistic signals while other combinations are not. A brief review of the complex subcortical region, particularly the known but seldom studied reticular system, indicates…

This review of the literature related to research on oral communication in the classroom pursues two issues: the types of oral contributions students make and whether those types are related to school achievement. In considering research on oral communication in classrooms, the paper looks at information that considers whether the communication…

Since there is a lack of studies that reveal school age children's oral competence in story production, a five-year longitudinal descriptive study was undertaken to determine a child's sense of story as revealed by children's oral generation of stories. The specific story elements analyzed were sources of their stories, narrative form, formal…

Impromptu speech is characterized by the simultaneous processes of ideation (the elaboration and structuring of reasoning by the speaker as he improvises) and expression in the speaker. Other elements accompany this characteristic: division of speech flow into short segments, acoustic relief in the form of word stress following a pause, and both…

The primary goal of early reading instruction, according to this paper, should be to teach children to comprehend written discourse in a manner similar to that for oral discourse because both types of discourse require decoding ability--graphic or acoustic. The paper asserts that to simply design reading instruction to achieve the subgoal of…

The language development of one child was examined from birth to three years of age in order to map the similarities and differences in the acquisition of oral language, reading, and writing skills. The study also sought to provide insight into why learning to read and write are not as naturally easy as learning to talk. Data were collected by…

The propositions and inferences in a narrative story can be classified into two sets: the structurally explicit are those concerned with the central theme or structure of the story, and the incidentally explicit deal with information peripheral to this theme. This study compared readers and listeners from grades three and five in their…

Four scales developed by Marion Monroe for recording, describing, analyzing, and rating children's oral language skills are described and presented in this paper. The skills assessed by the scales are first described as follows: (1) how a child thinks, as revealed by the quality of ideas; (2) how a child thinks, as revealed by definition of words;…

Once speech educators turn their attention to the "ideational" function of oral language--that portion pertaining to thinking--rather than the relational function, they will see that speech can and should be incorporated into every discipline. The psychologist Lev S. Vygotsky envisions the ways in which humans use speech to reorder their…

A study investigated the relationship between formal and conversational logic. Thirty-two male and 32 female college students evaluated the conclusions of conditional syllogism and participated in an interview adapted from Deanna Kuhn's (1991) monograph, "The Skills of Argument." Students were asked to provide explanations for several…

Impromptu speech is heard only once, at a rate of perception that depends on the speaker's delivery, and is specifically adapted to the listeners. These features trigger cognitive activities that facilitate translation. Impromptu speech is characterized by a constant interconnection between cognitive competence and language competence and between…

Recently there has been an increasing interest in the development of children's impressions of stories, partially due to the work of theorists who have proposed formal grammars representing structural characteristics of stories. In order to learn more about children's narrative competence, stories they produced were analyzed in three experiments.…

This collection of articles on language teaching and language acquisition theories includes: "Enseignement des langues et theories de l'acquisition. Introduction au colloque" ("Language Teaching and Theories of Acquisition. Introduction to the Colloquium") (Rene Richterich); "Apprendre une langue dans l'interaction verbale" ("Language Learning in…