Findings indicate that race is the most important determinant of pronoun usage, with blacks more likely to refer to the United States as "they" rather than "we". Among whites, they-saying is a phenomenon associated with lower education, though not with low income or with self identification as outside the middle class. (Author/AM)

The author discusses the difference between the use of a sign language (which has its own lexico-semantic, syntactic, and expressive rules) and the use of signs as codes representing English in various ways; he urges use of sign language to provide early natural language experience for deaf children. (Author/LS)

Uses the transposition paradigm to compare the influence of the adjectives "same" and "different" on the test choice of 5- and 9-year-old children. (Author/SDH)

This study of the speech of a five-year-old Japanese girl learning English focused on the use of prefabricated routines where items are memorized as wholes. The forms of the copula, "do you" questions and embedded "how to" questions were examined. (AG)

Recommends some deformalization of instruction, without rendering it simplistic, by cultivation of students' discrimination of the appropriateness of grammatical elements, at a level where the student has already accumulated examples of structures and situations in the language. Substantial examples are provided. (Text is in French.) (MSE)

An analysis of speech samples collected from adult ESL students revealed recurring variants indicating that learners attempt to simplify the target language in several ways. A universal process of simplification in language learning is postulated to account for the recurrence of the same variants in different learner idiolects. (Author/KM)

Several aspects of language--code, relation of structure to meaning, creativity, capacity to influence thought--are discussed, as well as reasons for including foreign language study in school and university. (RM)

Children who come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds and speak in nonstandard dialects should not be made to feel inferior but should be listened to. (JH)

The teacher of black students needs to develop a sensitivity to their rich communicative language styles in order to use the varied styles in the classroom situation. (JH)

A technique for decreasing interference between black dialect features and the hearing and production of standard English is described. (JH)

The flow of normal conversation is often impeded by error. These errors can be divided into at least three categories: phonological, lexical, and pragmatic. A study was designed to assess whether different kinds of errors affect conversation in different ways. Forty-four subjects listened to tapes of conversations. Each conversation contained…

Legal language is discussed in the context of concern about the comprehensibility of consumer documents and the trend toward simplification of the language used in these documents. Specific features of legal language and its functions within the legal community and society are identified. As a primary tool of the legal profession, legal language…

It is possible to construct a case for the child's interpretation of "of" in "must of been" as the preposition "of" in the process of language acquisition. Assuming the familiar concept that linguists should construct the simplest analysis compatible with a phenomenon, it is suggested that some children construct a…