Describes a study of adult listeners' perceptions of infant babbling. Adult judges were unable to identify language background significantly above chance level. Findings do not support the babbling drift hypothesis which predicts that babbling begins to approximate characteristics of the mother tongue as infants approach meaningful speech. (SED)

Tests were administered to obtain comparative data on the contentive verbal language of three-, four-, and five-year-old black children. (GW)

This article proposes a description of Spanish conjunctions based on functional and structural criteria, and attempts to present a taxonomy of the different functions of conjunctions. (Text is in Spanish.) (CLK)

This study focuses on a particular listening pattern in Japanese which occurs by overlapping with the current speaker's incrementing utterance. Applying the Conversational Analysis approach to conversational data, the study delineates how native speakers utilize overlapping listener responses to indicate their strong alignment, and why learners of…

No word-list memorization here! Instead, in this book educators will discover classroom-tested, research-based strategies for teaching spelling in a way that reflects how middle school students actually learn -- by using spelling strategies and recognizing language patterns. This publication presents a wealth of strategies, activities, and ideas…

This analysis of verb morphology in Seri finds evidence that empty consonants occur in root-medial position. Analysis focuses on the parallel conjugation patterns of the verbs for "know" and "give," finding an empty consonant slot in the middle of each. This position is never preceded by a consonant, so it never appears as a…

Classical phonemic accounts of Cuzco (Peru) Quechua posit three distinct types of stops: plain, aspirated, and glottalized. A later analysis argued instead for a root-level feature of laryngealization governed by a small number of formal mechanisms. This latter analysis is taken one step further, showing that even greater explanatory power may be…

The report of research on English grammar argues that the intransitive resultative construction requires head-movement of the secondary predicate to the main predicate in order to assign the theta-role to the postverbal NP in LF. Then, this construction is taken as an instance in which theta-role assignment is derivational, supporting the findings…

A study examined the shift from standard spoken Japanese to dialect and compared it to the shift from formal to informal forms, within the context of several theories of code-switching and style-shifting. A five-minute segment was taken from a 30-minute conversation between three female native Japanese-speakers, all familiar with the Osaka…

This study explores interrelationships among ratings by conversational partners and independent observers of empathy, warmth, and genuineness, and relates these ratings to partners' dialogue patterns. The results support the hypothesis that one of the parameters of temporal congruence, switching pauses, relates significantly to ratings of warmth…

First explains what is meant by "metalinguistic awareness" as a special dimension of language experience and its seeming importance in education; then describes a conception of the function of "play" in general and play with language in particular; and asks how educators might encourage play with language in school. (Author/JM)

Article also appeared in "International Journal of the Sociology of Language," n1; research supported by the Foundation for Jewish Culture, the Ford Foundation, and The Language Behavior Secion, Hebrew University. (DD)