With particular focus on the need to provide a practical, systematic introduction to the concept of sentence combining and to the signals used to control the various combining operations, this paper provides detailed specifications for including sentence combining as part of a comprehensive plan for teaching the composing process. The…

Experimental research on the environmental conditions that promote generative language learning is reviewed. Recombinative generalization is introduced as a process that enables individuals to express and to comprehend novel utterances. This review focuses on the use of a miniature linguistic system paradigm to explore how recombinative…

This paper notes the progress made in many countries towards the use of two or three languages in children's education. It is recommended that bilingual education focus on more than linguistic activities and include the study of the history and culture of all languages involved. This combination of bilingual and bicultural education aids in…

The child approaching reading for the first time comes well-equipped with developmental tools to lighten the task. Linguistically speaking, in addition to some decoding skills, the child has a full-blown syntactic system consisting of the basic syntactic forms, though some of the more intricate forms will not be mastered until much later.…

Subjects 9 to 15 years old were divided into four age levels by 18-month increments to compare learning disabled and normal students on indexes of both oral and written language. Four questions guided the inquiry: (1) Does the syntactic development of oral language differ at the age levels measured? (2) What is the trend of syntactic development…

Sound-meaning correspondences produced by an infant were studied under conditions of early rampant homonymy (i.e., production by a very young child of a small set of noncontrastive surface forms or phonetic sequences to refer to objects/events that on the basis of adult standards require the production of numerous contrasting surface forms). The…

Introducing Preschool Children to Reading through Parent Involvement is a project funded by a New York State Education Department mini-grant. The major activity of the project is to inform parents of preschool children of the research findings and theories concerning reading to young children. Three newsletters are mailed each year to families…

The relationship between speech and print is essentially asymmetrical and changes as the reading ability of the child improves. For the child who has succeeded at decoding, the asymmetry implies that commonalities between speech and print are more important than their differences. Three hypothetical observation points illustrate the similarity…

Acquiescence, the tendency to respond affirmatively regardless of the content of a question, was examined in 57 mentally retarded children (11 to 17 years old) and 91 nonretarded children (3 to 8 years old). Embedded within the standard interview schedule for both samples were two pairs of oppositely worded questions on the same topic.…

The goals of bilingual education and its relationship to education are examined, and a model for bilingual education is proposed. A definition of bilingual education is emerging that permits the child to choose the mode of communication with which he is most comfortable. Cognitive psychology and its emphasis upon the child's active interactions…

This issue of "TESL Reporter" presents the following articles: "Language Acquisition and Dialectalism" by Patricia G. Adkins, "Supplementation of Opposites in Simple Predicate Expansion" by Yao Shen, and "Form Class Baseball: A TESL Game" by Alice C. Pack. The meaning today of dialectal speech, or "bidialectal speech," is addressed by Patricia…

This collection of conference abstracts focuses on new directions for research on mental representation and early language development. One page summaries are provided on the following topics: Mental Representation and Initial Language Learning, by Lorraine M. Nicolich; Critical Issues in Language and Cognitive Development, by Roberta Corrigan;…

In this book, current work and issues in psycholinguistics are reviewed by 19 noted authorities in the fields of psychology, linguistics, education, psychiatry, and medicine. The seven sections of the book discuss past and present issues in psycholinguistics (including controversial issues and the theoretical and historical roots of…