An oral screening test administered by an adult to a five-year-old child was transcribed and analyzed. The test was chosen as an example of a referential communication task that is also a social communication task. The analysis demonstrates that a participant in communication assumes that the other participants are employing strategies for…

A telephone conversation was transcribed and marked for stress. A portion of the transcription, not marked for stress, was given to native English speakers who were asked to underline the word(s) in each sentence or phrase that should receive the most prominent stress. The overlap of actual stress and the assignments of the participants who were…

The development of the Conversational Unit (CU) was investigated in a semilongitudinal study of three mother/son dyads in nonstructured spontaneous communication. The children were 19 to 23 months old at the start of the investigation. Sound films were recorded monthly during bathing and feeding times. After four months, verbal and nonverbal…

Acoustical correlates of stress can only be evaluated in comparison with some "standard" specifying which syllables are actually stressed. The Standard should be consistent from time to time, and largely independent of talker and listener idiosyncrasies. Three phonetically-trained subjects listened to repeatedly spoken texts and spontaneous…

In a written discourse consisting of a string of "psychological paragraphs," there is in each such psychological paraqraph a "head" structure containing the topic which derives from the deep structure of the discourse. That "head" assertion differs from all other assertions in the psychological paragraph in that it carries new information. The…

Two theoretical orientations-schema theory and cultural norms for the use of language unify this multidisciplinary collection of papers examining discourse. Chapters by Adams and Collins; Warren; Nicholas and Trabasso; Stein and Glenn; and Freedle and Hale highlight the application of schema theory to the study of story recall, reading, and the…

The quality of hospital medical records, which are usually maintained by transcribing from doctors' dictation, was found to suffer because of foreign medical graduates' phonological problems and lack of familiarity with good dictation procedure. As a step in correcting this situation, eight taped discharge summaries were subjected to an analysis…