This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 20 titles deal with the following topics: the role of crib talk in language acquisition; syntactic parsing strategies; a case study of the first use of words; how two modes of literature presentation affect oral language…

Four conference papers on discourse are included. In "How Context Contributes to the Interpretation of Temporal Expressions," Carlota S. Smith provides a summary analysis of the temporal interpretation of English sentences. Many sentences are shown to be semantically incomplete; it is argued that information from neighboring sentences is…

In 1979, the typical entering seventh grade student at Perris Valley Junior High School (California) scored 21 months below grade norm in reading and 25 months below grade norm in language. To provide the students with language processing skills necessary for participation in the regular school curriculum, students in both junior and senior high…

Focusing on the acquisition of semantic features and the relation between semantic and perceptual features, this study further tests the "semantic feature hypothesis," where a child acquires full adult word meaning component by component, and its complementary "correlation hypothesis," which claims that the source of these semantic features lies…

Conceptual and syntactic strategies in reading a foreign language are considered with attention to the functioning of the sentence parser. Topics of analysis include: the theoretical background and the educational relevance of the question of strategies; a study of the relative importance of the two parsing principles (syntactically guided…

A study is reported relevant to the relationship between first words learned by children and gestural symbolization under a variety of contextual conditions. It is part of a larger longitudinal study of 32 children at 10, 13, 20, and 27 months of age. The children were seen in three standardized situations for eliciting gestural and vocal symbols:…

One hundred and twenty kindergarten and second grade children from 3 different language environments (40 Mexican Spanish-speaking children from Monterrey, Mexico, and 40 Chicano Spanish-speaking children and 40 English-speaking children from the same public elementary school in Houston, Texas) were given a perceptual matching test and a verbal…

The study was designed to test the effects of a limited amount of sentence-combining practice on the syntactic development and overall writing ability of foreign students. Participants were freshmen studying English as a second language during an eight-week period. Twenty-four students were divided into a control and an experimental group. The…

Studies were conducted to help determine criteria for describing the stages through which second language learners pass as they acquire a new language. The ability of 24 beginning adult students of English as a second language to supply ten morphemes in obligatory contexts was predicted on the basis of contrastive analysis between English and each…

The goal of this study is to discover the phonetic difficulties encountered in the acquisition of French as a second language by English-speaking children. The children are studying French in a total immersion situation without benefit of structural exercises or special French language laboratory classes. Of particular interest here is the extent…

The present paper reports on a case study investigating the acquisition of form and function of the English progressive by a seven-year-old Hebrew speaker, learning English as a second language. The paper describes the different elicitation techniques used, and discusses the suitability of such techniques for the investigation of form and…

This report describes the use of the English negative by three adult second language learners, and relates the findings to Schumann's "pidginization hypothesis." This hypothesis states that a particular subject's restricted English was the result of his social and possibly also his psychological distance from English speakers. In order to provide…

A study was conducted to test the utility of a protocol, consisting of 30 pragmatic parameters of language, to evaluate conversational speech from 157 subjects in six diagnostic groups. Four distinct profiles emerged separating the diagnostic groups within which differences in the distribution of pragmatic deficits were identified. (Author/KM)

Linguistic cohesion involves the semantic and syntactic relationships that link sentences together. Research on linguistic cohesion is related to readability and to developmental and ability-level issues in reading/writing. Instructional strategies for low-ability readers/writers include predicting comprehension problems through cohesion analysis…

The influence of visual and auditory factors and intonational emphasis on sentence comprehension skills of young normal and mentally handicapped children was studied, using the Sentence Comprehension Test. (Sample items are appended). (Author/MH)