The current study investigates narrative retelling and comprehension among 30 native Arabic-speaking preschool children with a mean age of 5:10. Narrative features of text-complexity (less-complex and more-complex episodic structure) and language variety (Spoken Palestinian Arabic [PA] and Modern Standard Arabic [MSA]) were analyzed for their…

Children in Austria are exposed to a large amount of variation within the German language. Most children grow up with a local dialect, German standard language and 'intermediate' varieties summarized as 'Umgangssprache'. Using an ABX design, this study analyses when Austrian children are able to discriminate native varieties of their L1 German…

All native speakers of Arabic read in a language variety that is remarkably distant from the one they use in everyday speech. The study tested the impact of this distance on reading accuracy and fluency by comparing reading of Standard Arabic (StA) words, used in StA only, versus Spoken Arabic (SpA) words, used in SpA too, among Arabic native…

Investigates the range of Creole and standard English tense-aspect markers used by men and women at two age levels in the Islands of Tobago in the Southern Caribbean. People aged 70 and over and people aged 16-21 were compared on critical social variables and interviews were designed to tap their full range of communicative competence. (Author/VWL)

A review of recent language research regarding the black English vernacular (BEV) considers new developments involving (1) the grammars of elderly and young speakers; (2) indications that BEV is not decreolizing but is actually diverging from white speech; and (3) the effect of contemporary developments on differences between black and white…

A study combining qualitative and quantitative research methods (a direct survey) investigated the attitudes of 75 working class individuals in Glasgow, Scotland toward differences in the speech of older or younger people and in the speech of the opposite sex. Results indicate that dialect lexis loss was neither as thorough nor as abrupt as older…

This study was based on a modification and extension of Greene's (1969) test wherein children choose structurally-transformed sentences which are synonymous with key sentences, thereby indicating recognition of the transformational relationships involved and internalization of those transformations. A similar test was devised to investigate the…

A survey of 55 Chinese students and scholars visiting the United States investigated attitudes toward the spread of Putonghua, the standard variety of Chinese. Results indicate six categories of attitude, five supporting its spread. They also show a correlation of attitude with age, birthplace, current residence, and parents' occupation.…