A report from the Educational Resources Information Center at the National Council of Teachers of English; includes ERIC abstracts of documents pertinent to this topic. (RD)

Bibliography included. (DS)

Discusses a study of the grammar and syntax development in the speech of three children; adapted from the forthcoming book, Developmental Psychology Today" (CRM Books, Communications Research Machines, Inc., 1971). (Editor/SW)

Highlights a research study indicating that children can spontaneously impose linguistic structure on their communication, even in the absence of a conventional linguistic environment. Subjects (16- to 50-month-old deaf children) had normal social environments but severely restricted language environments because of their disability. (JN)

The question of whether the exclusive use of spoken English (i.e., oralism) causes brain atrophy for the hearing impaired child is examined in light of data presented by R. Conrad and other researchers. It is concluded that deafness itself is the fundamental cause of performance deficits. (SEW)

The modified stage hypothesis, which predicts the balance of right v. left hemisphere involvement in learning or acquisition of languages, is examined and an apparent contradiction is found between conclusions from experimental findings supporting the hypothesis and Krashen's Monitor theory underlying it. (MSE)

Excerpts from a discussion among five applied linguistics researchers with an interest in second-language acquisition (SLA) focus on three issues: important recent advances in SLA research, transmission of research findings to teachers, and maintenance of communication between the worlds of theory and practice. (MSE)

Reports on research intended to determine whether easing the cognitive processing load by having writers deal with contextually familiar material improves fluency, grammaticality, and complexity of the writing. Overall results tend to indicate that writing does improve when the material is culturally familiar. (EKN)