In an attempt to answer some of the questions concerning the roles of syntactic vs. semantic cues and the similarities and/or differences between the first (L1) and second (L2) language reading strategies, a pilot study was conducted with 47 English-speaking students enrolled in French as a second language classes at a bilingual, English-French…

Preschoolers' ability to understand grammatical relations in passives and to generalize was studied using animate referents. Three- to five-year-old children were taught to produce passive sentence descriptions of events in which animacy of the actor and acted-on object were varied. After pretesting to determine passive sentence comprehension, the…

Two possible iconic models of the acquisition of verb agreement in American Sign Language (ASL) are developed and contrasted with a third, morphological account of the acquisition of this aspect of ASL. Additionally, data from spontaneous conversation of deaf children who have deaf parents are considered to test these three models. An iconic model…

This document presents sample lesson plans for Level 3, part of a proposed fourth volume in this series of curriculum guides, and a more detailed sampling of Level 4, which will be volume 5 of the series. The samples for Level 3 are two lesson plans for Unit Two, the content of Unit 7, and some lesson plans for that unit. The Level 4 section…

To find an area of weakness in disabled readers that might profitably be strengthened, the level of language development of disabled secondary readers was compared with that of competent secondary readers. The group of disabled readers used in the study consisted of 20 high school students in a corrective reading class; the comparison group…

The chapters in this volume represent a type of current psycholinguistic research that focuses both on the nature of human information processing and the coding of linguistic structure. The chapters and authors are as follows: (1) "The Wherefores and Therefores of the Competence-Performance Distinction," by V. Valian; (2) "Levels of Processing and…

A study of overregularized use of verbs by two children over a period when they were 2 1/2 to 5 years of age shows overregularizations in two directions: non-causative verbs were used as causatives; and causative verbs were used non-causatively. According to terminology from logic, predicates were classified according to the number of noun-phrase…

PART ONE OF THIS COMPREHENSIVE MANUAL OF CHUVASH COMPRISES A BRIEF SURVEY OF THE HISTORY, CUSTOMS, AND SOME IMPORTANT ASPECTS OF THE CHUVASH ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL SYSTEMS. A MAP AND GAZETTEER OF THE PLACE NAMES OF CHUVASHIA (CHUVASH AUTONOMOUS SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLIC OF THE USSR), BASED ON THE MAP IN THE "GREAT SOVIET ENCYCLOPEDIA," NOVEMBER…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 17 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) the impact of cognitive development upon audience awareness in the writing process, (2) a theory of college composition and academic prose, (3) public…

A study investigated one aspect of the speech/reading comprehension relationship--that between the ability to select the correct standard English verbal endings (-s and -ed) and the ability to recognize the tense of a passage when time information was encoded primarily in the verbs and adverbs. Subjects were 135 third, sixth, and ninth grade…

Representative research studies of the interference of Vernacular Black English (VBE) on beginning reading of VBE speakers at the phonological, grammatical, and lexical and content levels are examined. The following conclusions emerge: (1) phonological interference in learning to read has not been established; (2) VBE does not clearly interfere…

Regardless of the way in which one chooses authentic texts for a course in reading a language for special purposes, at one time or another, one is confronted with the problem of textual analysis. The analysis has to be done in view of the course objectives. A pre-instructional analysis allows the instructor to work out teaching strategies which…

This paper addresses itself to the way in which K'ekchi speakers identify the subject and the object in simple sentences. An attempt is made to determine: (1) whether K'ekchi has a basic word order, (2) the possible functions of any derived word order, and (3) whether there are any constraints on the logically possible word orders in K'ekchi. A…

The second of three skill sequence manuals for special education students considers the development of language arts. Objectives are listed sequentially for the following major areas (sample subcategories in parentheses): classification (listening/speaking, sorting, grouping); comprehension (affective, factual recall, following directions,…

These proceedings contain six conference papers with commentary and discussion: (1) Dell Hymes, "On Communicative Competence," (2) David McNeill, "How to Learn a First Language," (3) Wayne O'Neil, "A Theory of Linguistic Performance," (4) William Stewart, "Social Dialect," (5) Paul Cohen, "Some Methods in Sociolinguistic Research," and (6) S. Alan…