Reviews and discusses experimental and observational research on the function of the social environment of the child in the mastery of syntactic regularities during language acquisition. Theories based on modeling, imitation, and reinforcement are addressed. A 73-item reference list accompanies the text. (Author/JL)

How verbal information is processed and recalled appears to be influenced by the structure of the information presented (e.g., unrelated sentences vs. narratives) and the processes the listener uses to encode the information (e.g., verbatim encoding vs. gist extraction). Twenty adults, half with a history of learning disabilities (HLD) and half…

The question of whether children's accentuation strategies are determined by the linguistically established context was studied. A second investigation determined whether the difference between distinctive and nondistinctive information is marked by the speaker's accentuation, focusing the listener's attention upon the crucial information. In the…

This discussion of verbal communication seeks to bring a new "unity" and order into the study of linguistics, to make linguistics truly an interdisciplinary science, and to communicate more effectively with the outside world, peopled by those who do not speak linguistic jargon. The particular linguistic problem here is an exploratory…

A series of seven experiments provided information on the relationship between the learning of prose and the structural importance of the linguistic subunits. Five samples of prose, including narrative folktales and two samples of textual prose, were studied to determine whether the patterning of learning corresponded to the structural importance…

This review, based on a survey of more than 1200 items in the research literature, begins by attempting to outline a theory of language comprehension and learning from language. A lengthy chapter is devoted to problems in the measurement of comprehension and of learning from connected discourse. Also considered, in successive chapters, are the…

This study examines ways in which children verbalize emotional experiences at successive age levels. Four groups of 16 boys and girls each drawn from the second, fourth, sixth, and eighth grades of a middle class private school in New York City were asked to describe happiness, sadness, love, anger, and fear. Raw protocols were scored according to…

This document is the seventh report in the Language Research in Progress (LRIP) series, and lists a wide variety of language-related research projects current between April 1968 and November 1968. Research projects terminated in the six months prior to publication are included as well. Approximately 250 projects in the U.S. and abroad are…