Analyzed attitudes of 617 New Zealand listeners toward a New Zealand English speaker and a Standard American English speaker. Speakers altered pitch and rate in their delivery. On balance, the impact of paralinguistic behaviors was greater than that of accent. (Author/SLD)

Six Down's syndrome children (mean age 10 years) were observed in three settings: structured school, unstructured school, and home. Private speech utterances were recorded. Results showed that 13% of the utterances were private speech, with Ss varying from 11 to 53 utterances. Forty-nine percent of the utterances functioned as…

A study investigated the intonational patterns used by women and men at the ends of utterances for the purpose of managing discourse. The research sought to describe how intonation helps to signal that a speaker is through speaking and desires a response or reaction from the listener, or that the speaker is not through with a turn and wishes to…

The study sought to isolate and identify patterns occurring in language interactions between mothers and their nonhandicapped and Down Syndrome children. Data were collected as part of a 3-year study of language interaction. Twenty nonhandicapped (NH) and 20 Down Syndrome (DS) children and their mothers were evaluated via a demographic inventory,…

A sociolinguistic analysis of texts is advocated for expanding an oral interpreter's creation of an event from written texts. Two studies are reviewed that suggest that language choices are related to the speaker's purpose, thought processes, role, cultural expectations, and sex. The specific area of study suggested as highly useful for…

An approach to reversing pervasive pronunciation errors in students of English as a second language has been developed that uses a variety of techniques and strategies based on the assumptions that: (1) changing habits is a gradual process; (2) progress occurs when students are aware of their problems and the solutions; (3) most learning must…

The research findings of profane language usage need to be extended so that more may be learned about human communication. In order to establish profane language usage norms, eighty-six university students were asked to estimate their profane language usage in each of three categories (excretory, religious, and sexual) in reference to three…

This paper explores how one facet of the process by which ideology about linguistic variation originates and circulates. It analyzes an archive consisting of newspaper articles from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, about Pittsburgh speech, the earliest of which is from 1910. The articles began appearing regularly during the 1950s-60s. First, the paper…

The pronunciation and use of /s/ in the isleno dialect of Spanish, a dying language spoken in a small ethnic enclave in southeast Louisiana, is examined. Today, there are fewer than 20 fluent speakers of isleno Spanish, which has been described as a fossilized derivative of the speech of Canary Island peasants with additions from Spanish sailors.…

The study was designed to identify the patterns, if any, that language impaired children use when employing stress in spontaneous speech. Five preschool boys with a variety of language problems involving pragmatics, syntax, semantics, and/or phonology were identified as subjects. Both had received language therapy within the last 5 years and,…

In order to investigate speech accommodation--the way in which communicators influence each other's speaking patterns and rhythms--a study examined its occurrence, as well as the extent of a conversational partner's influence, and the influence of interpersonal uncertainty and differences in arousal level upon that accommodation process.…

This study examines the conversational behaviors of subjects with differing verbal abilities within a three-person group setting. According to a score on the Verbal Reticence Scale (Lustig, 1974), 108 subjects were rated as highly verbal, moderately verbal, or verbally reticent. From these classifications, smaller groups were selected at random to…

A study investigated differences between older adult male and female voice patterns. In addition, the study examined whether certain differences between male and female speech characteristics were lifelong and not associated with the aging process. Subjects were 10 young (average age 30) and 10 old (average age 75) males and 10 young (average age…

The purposes of this study were to examine (1) the extent to which three-year-old children converged noncontent speech to that of adults and (2) whether a talkativeness-reticence factor influenced the degree of convergence. Four three-year-old girls individually interacted with six to eight unfamiliar adults in free-play settings. From…

Data on four infants between the ages of 12 and 20 months were collected to answer two questions about children's communication behavior. (1) Is there a correspondence between communicative intentions expressed in gestures and vocal utterances? If both spring from common organismic tendencies, it should be possible to discern an "indicating"…