This article is addressed to those for whom information is the key focus for the study of language and its deployment in discourse. The message is that action figures centrally and generically, and that the absence of actions can be as decisive as their occurrence for the deployment of language and the interactional construction of discourse. (47…

As a step toward developing more controlled studies into children's language, this study attempted to develop standard stimuli to elicit eight basic sentence patterns from kindergarten children. Four stimuli were developed for each pattern. Each stimulus consisted of a stick-figure picture, a description of the picture, and a question or direction…

The multifaceted structure of sentence-completion test items was analyzed to explain verbal comprehension. The three stimulus constituents were technical, logical-semantic, and associative-contextual. Guttman's facet and order theories and smallest space analysis were used. Results confirmed the multiple skills involved in solving these tasks.…