Research presented in this paper on the character of infant-directed speech and the nature of infant speech perception abilities from 6 to 12 months suggests that prosody contributes significantly to early analyses of child languages and assists infants in developing root processes of parsing. (104 references) (Author/CK)

The articulator positions of a man with deafness who had a cochlear implant were measured with an electromagnetic midsagittal articulometer system with and without auditory feedback via his implant. Findings suggest that the cochlear implant was providing important auditory cues that can be used to monitor speech and maintain phonemic contrasts.…

This study of the oral motor behaviors of seven toddlers (age 15 months) may be interpreted to indicate that: (1) mandibular coordination follows a developmental continuum from earlier emerging behaviors, such as chewing and sucking, through babbling, to speech, or (2) unique task demands give rise to distinct mandibular coordinative constraints…

Examines infants' sensitivity to word units in fluent speech by inserting one-second pauses either at boundaries between successive words or between syllables within words. Results indicate that, by 11 months, infants are sensitive to word boundaries, and that this sensitivity depends on more than prosodic information or prior knowledge. (65…

Examines quantitative data concerning hesitation phenomena in relation to the subjective perceptions of listeners of nonnative English. Findings reveal that subjective judgments of the number of hesitations or pauses in nonnative speech derive from total pausing time, percentage of pause time, and the length of the longest pause in discourse. (30…

Examines the use of finiteness markers copula "BE" and auxiliaries "BE" and "DO" in the spontaneous speech of children with specific language impairment. Focus is on whether the categorical distinctions between main verbs and auxiliaries and/or between the auxiliary types influence the relative order of emergence…

Considers two competing accounts of how writers construct meaning, the designative tradition (which holds that speech artifacts mediate people's thinking) and the expressive tradition (which focuses on the transformation of inner speech to public speech). Show how one student's writing experiences reveal the interrelated roles of these two…

Identifies the features of effective educational talk, using contextual differences between educational and social settings as starting points for the examination of students' seminar discourse, videotaped during a study of small-group classroom discussions in the United Kingdom. Findings reveal that these features include an appreciation of the…

Explores ways in which expert and novice roles are constituted and maintained in an academic counseling encounter. Characterizes the meeting as a socializing, problem-solving event and uses functional linguistics and discourse analysis to describe how the counselor and student mark stance through linguistic choices such as polarity, modality,…

This study examined cognitive ability, short-term verbal memory, and speech perception in relation to phonological awareness in 42 gifted and 49 regular 3rd and 4th graders and in 61 prereading kindergartners. Those with higher cognitive reasoning skills scored higher on tasks of phonological awareness than those with lower reasoning skills.…

Investigated the influence of a talker's face (e.g., articulatory gestures) and voice, vocalic context, and word position in the training of Japanese and Korean English as a Second Language to identify American English /r/ and /l/. Findings revealed significant effects of training type, talker, word position, and vowel. Findings are compatible…

Focuses on the qualitative methods used to examine a high school science teacher's instructional practice and his students' performance. Explains participation-observation, collection of field notes and documents, pre-post survey, interviews, and analysis of analytic memos; and discusses the teacher's goal of combining skills-based instruction…

An ethnomethodological approach was used to analyze the organization of talk, the leader-student interaction, and resultant social order during group discussion among 2 male leaders and 15 ninth-grade Australian boys participating in a school-sponsored outdoor experience. Results focus on how the leaders structured the interaction and regulated…

Analyzes listener back-channel responses observed in conversations--in English--between American and Japanese university students. Emphasizes the importance of careful attention given to the interactional management observed in intercultural conversation as well as the significance of realizing "otherness" in communication and social…

Notes that one way to ensure that students understand the importance of developing communicative abilities is to utilize Spanish language resources in the United States, as in an excursion to a "tienda" (shop), where they negotiate with the Spanish-speaking owner. (seven references) (Author/CK)