Up to the present, no studies have been done in the area of child language in Mexico. The Center of Linguistic and Literary Studies of the Colegio de Mexico carried out an empirical investigation of the language of six- to seven-year-old Mexican children. This paper presents, in preliminary form, some partial results of the investigation,…

This two-part paper emphasizes the importance of language enrichment and active listening skills as a basis for reading pleasure. While acknowledging the need for developing fundamental decoding skills, the first section advocates that adults read aloud to children from books reflecting the adult's reading interests, containing creative language,…

To assess the importance of visual attributes relative to acoustic and semantic attributes in children's encoding, a 64-item recognition test was administered to first- and sixth-grade children. Recognition items were linedrawings of simple objects accompanied by aural labels. By manipulating the picture, label, and referent in various…

The purpose of this essay is to expand the conceptual content of folkloric performance as a communicative phenomenon, as spoken art. Performance is seen as representing an interpretive frame, whose nature may vary. This framing is accomplished through the use of culturally conventionalized metacommunication (communication about communication),…

The performance and recognition of the act of putting people on involves an awareness and use not only of aspects of the communicative process that hold for all face-to-face interaction, but also of culturally acquired aspects of communication. Teasing and punning are varieties of communicative acts that involve the use of the put-on to accomplish…

Operant conditioning principles were used to promote verbalizations based on current event television news stories in three institutionalized 15-year-old retardates. Percentages of correct responses concerning the videotaped news segments were recorded in four experimental conditions: baseline, massed news with tokens and praise contingent on…

The communications barrier confronting the ghetto child, the child from Appalachia, or the reservation Indian is the standard middle-class English taught in most schools. Ways of dissolving this barrier are suggested. Speaking habits as well as thinking patterns of teachers must frequently alter. A child should be encouraged to verbalize and to…

The first of two papers on language history broadly defines historical linguistics and considers the activities of the descriptive linguist, who classifies the features of a language; the comparative linguist, who relates languages to one another; and the historical linguist, who is interested in the changes, completed and anticipated, of a living…

In this study, features of the child's development of language were described in terms of rhetorical communication--i.e., the child's development of language (inventio), his use of conceptual schemes to elaborate and unify utterance (dispositio), and his acquisition of an abstract communicative perspective permitting him to use language…

This study was conducted to explore the ability of children (6 to 12 years of age) to understand certain relatively complex relationships as they are commonly signaled syntactically in our language. It was hypothesized that development in language performance during this age range was, in some measure, a function of a growing ability to comprehend…

The purpose of this study was to determine statistically significant linguistic features of oral and written discourse rated quite high or low by teachers, and to make recommendations based on these findings to supplement existing guidelines for teaching composition. Fifty-five paired oral (tape-recorded) and written compositions were elicited…

The objective of naturalistic observations conducted in schools and homes in the inner city was to relate teacher expectation to pupil behavior. Following kindergarten observations, selected black children predicted as potentially successful and black children predicted as poor achievers were observed in their homes along with their mothers. This…

With present advances in communication technology, profound and qualitative changes in our civilization are taking place--in business and politics, in education, in entertainment, interpersonal relations, and the organization of society itself. In honor of the significance of such developments, an entire issue of "Scientific American" magazine…

Concern during the past decade with educational failures of urban Negro children suggested the need for empirical evidence demonstrating whether or not students use identical grammatical and stylistic structures in both speech and writing. Fourteen black, inner city junior high students, all of whom speak "black English," were interviewed for…

Four methods used in trial examinations in oral English for the Certificate of Secondary Education in England are described, and the assessment system and rating scales are discussed. The four methods are: 1. Reading Aloud, 2. Prepared Talk, 3. Private Conversation about a Visual Stimlus, and 4. Group Discussion. The aim of all the tests is to…