Developmental trends in the effects of expectations regarding agent/action matches on judgments of sentence acceptability were investigated. Five sentences reflected expected relations ("harmonious") and five contradicted them ("contrary"). Twelve subjects each were in grades 4 through 8 during year 1; the same 60 subjects…

Recent experimental work in teaching standard English to speakers of nonstandard dialects of English has shown that such speakers often have a good receptive command of the standard dialect, and readily re-encode stimuli presented in the standard dialect into their own nonstandard forms. This fact shows that some modification is needed in the…

The process of explanation as defined by the covering law model of science contains stringent criteria which often cannot be met by communication scientists. An alternative model, less powerful but more obtainable--the system paradigm--should be adopted. Four types of explanation provide a context for a discussion of the system paradigm…