This dissertation draws on both qualitative and quantitative approaches to investigate the linguistic practices of teachers and children who are learning Mandarin Chinese as a Heritage Language (CHL) in two dual immersion preschools in California. CHL children have been interpreted as novice members in local speech communities who actively explore…

Selected phonological, morphological, and syntactic evidence from two hours of tape recordings of conversations of a four-year-old Native American New Mexican was examined to determine its value in assessing the child's bidialectalism. (Author/SW)

This article discusses how and when children acquire and master various speech styles, and specifically deals with the development of sex-specific speech as influenced by role expectations. (CLK)

The purpose of the study reported in this document was to examine the oral language and some of the influences on oral language of students from five to nine years old. Six students in each of 13 classes were selected randomly and were taped in three different situations: a monologue by the student when alone in the room, a dialogue with another…

Because of the syntactic differences between Spanish and Quechua, Quechua-speaking children must make major word order adjustments to learn the Peruvian Spanish taught in school. This study investigates whether the order or time sequence in which these changes are adopted reflects any general constraint, or is in any way predicted by a theory of…

Based on an interview study of 138 kindergarten children, the data for the most part did not support Bernstein's ideas. Speech style indicators did not cluster into elaborated and restricted variants. Neither social control strategies nor school achievement scores were differentially related to elaborated and restricted variants. (PD)

This study investigated the linguistic characteristics of speech addressed to the child and the features of the verbal environment critical for learning language. The study focused on the prosodic and paralinguistic features of adult speech to the young child. Adult speech directed to children was compared to other kinds of systematic speech…

Seven papers are provided. Mary Rainey's paper, "Style Switching in a Head Start Class," considers speech styles used in the classroom. "Language Acquisition in the Deaf: Some Suggestions for Inclusion in the Field Manual," by Carol Pfuderer, suggests areas of psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic research relevant to the exploration of deaf…

This issue includes four papers: (1) "Context in Children's Speech," by Jenny Cook-Gumperz and John J. Gumperz, demonstrates how context is used as a framing device for semantic interpretation of messages. It is suggested that context is not simply background information but part of the total message, entering into the information communicated,…

This volume contains working papers on a variety of topics in linguistics. They include: "A View of Phonology from a Cognitive and Functional Perspective" (Joan Bybee); "The Geography of Language Shift: Distance from the Mexican Border and Spanish Language Claiming in the Southwestern United States" (Garland D. Bills, Eduardo…

This research study explores how sex role identity is related to the learning of communication and socialization processes in a Taiwanese kindergarten. The study hypothesized that undifferentiated baby-style verbal and nonverbal communication patterns are superceded with styles that become increasingly gender-linked, and language is viewed as a…