Mothers of cleft and noncleft palate children (C- and non C-mothers) listened to a reading by a cleft palate child of a passage containing specified combinations of nasality and intelligibility. Groups were either uninstructed or instructed to listed to the content or the manner of speech; they assessed the nasality and intelligibility of the…

This study attempted to answer three questions dealing with written communication: (1) Does the nature of the essay test penalize poor writers? (2) Can short-term, concentrated instruction measurably improve the communication ability of poor writers? (3) Is written communicative ability strongly related to knowledge of the English language? To…

Because the use of "good" grammar is directly related to status in American society, changes in grammatical usage are made slowly and cautiously. Current American linguistic attitudes are derived from two aspects of the early New England school tradition: the development of lexicography initiated in this country by Noah Webster, and the…

To assess mother-child interaction, 23 mother-child pairs from the West Harlem ghetto (half lower class and half middle class Negroes) and from Washington Square (white middle class) were observed. Children were 3-year-old boys. Each pair spent 30 minutes in a laboratory playroom and were observed and tape-recorded. Children's nonverbal…

Social Science assumes, as our human experience daily confirms, that social life is orderly. This paper proposes to document the detailed orderliness of actual conversational interaction, show that participants orient to this orderliness, and explicate the knowledge--together with the rules for situated use of this knowledge--which members…

Using participant, trainer, and observer reports and resources, this study examined perceptual and other training laboratory behavior. Twelve executives in a 3 1/2 day laboratory gave free-response descriptions of themselves and other group members. They completed interval-type ratings on each of 20 descriptive items. During the final session,…

Thirty classrooms (10 preschool, 10 kindergarten, and 10 first grade) in New York and Chicago were observed in this study of teacher and student verbal behavior. The study investigated the extent to which pupils imitate a rewarding teacher's verbal style when talking among themselves. From the 10 classes at each grade level, the six that showed…

The importance of building positive attitudes and habits in developing successful reading experiences is discussed. In order to have positive attitudes toward himself and toward his reading, the child must acquire basic concepts about language and its relation to himself. Among these concepts are (1) I can talk about what I think about, (2) what I…

To determine the effects of oral sentence-structure exercises upon student writing, a 1-year experiment was conducted with two randomly matched fourth-grade classes of approximately equal size, one control class and one experimental class. The experimental group regularly completed exercises designed to teach students to produce sentences…

This book makes a comparative study of the prose fiction of Graham Greene and the films made from that fiction. Special attention is focused upon the "cinematic" style of Greene's prose, the effect of Greene's screenwriting on his novels, and the characteristics of Greene's filmscripts. The book is divided into considerations of Greene…

A major concern of educators in Illinois and elsewhere is that students be given the opportunity to master the basic skills of reading, communication, computation, and problem solving. It is important for school districts to recognize this concern on a local level by including in the program plan for their districts student goals which mention…

There has been little research on the communicative behaviors of Afro-Americans, whose language and public messages rarely fit into traditional patterns of Anglo-Saxon discourse. Intensive study is warranted in numerous areas. One is the area of linguistic continuity research, which investigates similarities in vocabulary and expression between…

This study was designed to simulate some aspects of classroom verbal interaction and to investigate their cognitive effects on students, using cognitive theory as the theoretical rationale. Subject-determined verbalization of correct cues was crossed with external sources of verbalized correct cues in a multivariable design in which sex was…

This study investigated the spontaneous use of verbal mediators in discrimination learning, the transfer of mediators to a free recall task, and the effects of a pretraining task on performance. The discrimination tasks required nursery school children (80) to: (1) sort three instances each of two different concepts in a conceptually consistent…

Three experiments assessed the ability of children 2 to 5 years of age to infer, under very simple task conditions, what another person sees when viewing something from a position other than the children's own. Data indicates that some ability of this genre appears to exist by age 2. The data also suggests a distinction between an earlier and a…