Minority languages in diglossic situations with a majority language face the danger of eventual loss of vitality. The first sign of this is when child language acquisition begins to erode. This dissertation investigates the intergenerational transmission of the Isan language, spoken in the Northeastern region of Thailand. While the Isan community…

Investigated the effect of language on Chinese-speaking children's performance on false-belief tasks under three between-subjects conditions. Chinese-speaking adults and young children responded to false-belief tasks. Results revealed a rapid developmental pattern in the children's understanding of false beliefs and suggested the important role of…

Presents conversations of a group of fifth graders collaborating on a social studies task to illustrate how childen use language to learn. Focuses on one student whose oral language was rapid and chaotic but who demonstrated extremely sophisticated and complex structuring of knowledge to understand a particular social studies concept. (HTH)

Papers on a variety of linguistic topics include six papers from a Festschrift and nine others, as follows: "Attitudes Towards English as a Possible Lingua Franca in Switzerland" (Urs Durmuller); "Functional Stability and Structural Levelling of Dialects: The Case of Maastricht" (Anton M. Hagen, Henk Munstermann); "On the…

The collection of essays on language contact and language conflict includes: "Language Choices: Contact and Conflict?" (Martin Putz); "Language Ecology: Contact Without Conflict" (Peter Muhlhausler); "Towards a Dynamic View of Multilingualism" (Ulrike Jessner); "A Matter of Choice" (Florian Coulmas); The…

Papers presented at the symposium on the relationship between language and culture include, in addition to an opening adress: "Sociosemiotics Across Cultures" (Wolfgang Kuhlwein); "Translation Across Languages or Across Cultures?" (Albrecht Neubert); "Grammatical Categories Across Cultures" (Olga Tomic); "On…