The theme of this volume, complexity, accuracy and fluency (CAF) as dimensions of second language production, proficiency and development, represents a thriving area of research that addresses two general questions that are at the heart of many studies in second language acquisition and applied linguistics: What makes a second language (L2)…

This study investigated how task complexity affected native and non-native speakers' speaking performance in terms of a measure of communicative success (functional adequacy), three types of fluency (breakdown fluency, speed fluency, and repair fluency), and lexical diversity. Participants (208 non-native and 59 native speakers of Dutch) carried…

Confirms that listeners rely on communicators' levels of linguistic nonimmediacy (the degree of verbal indirectness with which communicators refer to themselves) for impression formation. (RB)

It has usually been psycholinguistics which has accommodated itself to alterations within linguistic formulations, but now there is a growing independence on the part of many psychologists in the study of language. The shift in emphasis is from competence to performance. (POP)

Evidence is offered to support the view that linguistic competence cannot in principle be divorced from linguistic performance in order to abstract universal properties of grammars, that rules of grammar inevitably incorporate perceptual strategies and constraints, and that grammaticality and acceptability are related to predictability. A theory…

A structured elicitation technique, convergent communication, was investigated as a means of constraining the range of linguistic data from children in K-3 without unduly constraining the naturalness of the conversation context. The convergent communication situation is a two-person problem-solving task which ensures that all communication is…

Each speaker-hearer commands a language system that he uses unconsciously as he speaks and writes. Discovery of the rules underlying that system shows the futility of some accepted teaching practices and suggests other approaches. (Author)

In response to earlier studies by Thompson and Chapman (1977) and Clark and Clark (1977), 16 middle-class and upper-class White children between 1.2 and 2.2 were tested for overextension in production and comprehension. (AM)

The purpose of this study was to investigate differences among four oral language elicitation probes used to collect language samples from young children. Ten kindergarten, ten first-grade, and ten second-grade children provided the oral language samples. Each class was divided by sex, and five boys and five girls from each grade were randomly…

This investigation studied the relationships of children's reading achievement to their ability to reproduce orally selected phonological, morphological, and syntactical structures presented in "The Gloria and David Beginning English, Series No. 20, Test 6" (GDBE). The subjects were 198 Spanish-surnamed and black third graders. Reading achievement…

This article outlines a model of the two basic components of a text, namely, the system of formal linguistic rules, and the realization of these rules into concrete discourse, by means of particular transformations. (Text is in French.) (CLK)

Ninety children between the ages of three and six described objects which differed on three simultaneous dimensions, using adjective combinations appropriate to the dimensions. Each child performed an imitation, comprehension, and production task. (Author/CFM)

This paper presents a means of evaluating answers to comprehension questions by analyzing the oral language used in the answers to the questions according to the average number of words per communication unit, a measure of linguistic and cognitive growth, in order to determine the effectiveness of comprehension questions asked at two cognitive…

Some of the major studies by the proponents of the Derivational Theory of Complexity are reviewed in this paper, and the results of a study to determine the adequacy of the theory as an account of message processing difficulty are included. The subjects for the study were students selected from five sections of the introductory communication class…

This article concludes that language mixes do not constitute a major interference in the acquisition of bilingualism since children appear to be able to differentiate their two linguistic systems from an early age. (Author/NCR)