Purpose: This study was aimed at determining the role of prosody and situational context in children's understanding of expressive utterances. Which one of these 2 cues will help children grasp the speaker's intention? Do children exhibit a "contextual bias" whereby they ignore prosody, such as the "lexical bias" found in other studies (M. Friend…

The immediate recall is compared of 15 speech concepts presented in mixed order in 3 modalities: auditory, symbolically visual (written), and iconic. Results of experiments with 121 subjects suggest that the first step of information processing is a differentiation of sensory stimuli. (10 references) (LB)

Investigation of the use of five speech markers in the native and second-language production of French-English bilinguals (N=10) found no quantitative difference in the frequency of occurrence of speech markers between the high (N=5) and low (N=5) fluency speakers, although high-fluency speakers used more progressive than regressive marker types.…

In studying the role of context in speech act performance, the tradition has been to use controlled elicitation instruments that allow for manipulation of social dimensions. The assumption is that by controlling social context, all respondents will assess social relations very similarly, although little research has dealt with the validity of this…

A study exploring native English-speakers' and advanced Chinese English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) learners' beliefs about how a face-threatening speech act, refusal, should be expressed is reported. The two major research questions of the study were: how native speakers of English and Chinese English as a Foreign Language (EFL) differ in their…

A contrastive study of Japanese and American English sought to explore how speakers agree and disagree in the two languages. Japanese-speaking college students and American English-speaking teachers of English as a foreign language were informally questioned about food preferences, with their comments surreptitiously recorded for analysis. Results…

Investigates the effect of oral and electronic media on interaction patterns by learners of Japanese as a second language. The framework for the analysis of learner is speech act theory, which provides a richly developed set of descriptive categories by which to examine interactional processes. (Author/JL)

This study compared patterns in the requests of native Persian-speakers (n=50) and native speakers of American English (n=52) under the same social constraints. Students were undergraduate students in their native countries. Data were gathered by controlled elicitation (open questionnaire) and coded for degree of directness. Results show the…

A study investigated differences in the speech styles used in making requests among five native speakers of Japanese (JJ), five American learners of Japanese (AJ), and Americans speaking English (AE) and their implications for intercultural communication. All subjects were adults. Data were elicited in role-plays of a scenario including the…

This volume on pragmatics and language learning includes the following: "'Cultural Scripts': A Semantic Approach to Cultural Analysis and Cross-Cultural Communication" (Anna Wierzbicka); "Issues in Second Language Learning in a Multilingual Context" (Ayo Bamgbose); "Cross-Cultural Speech Act Research and the…

The selection of papers from the 6th Annual International Conference on Pragmatics and Language Learning (Urbana, Illinois, April 1992) include: "Discourse Markers Across Language" (Bruce Fraser); "Conjunction and Causality: Pragmatics and the Lexicon" (Yael Ziv); "Situated Discourse: The Sociocultural Context of…