Discusses conversation as a medium for school change, a way to build community, and as a means for designing new systems of learning. Examines the value of conversation and dialog, and suggests strategies for conversations that differ from traditional argument and debate. Notes that in design conversation, the group shares the responsibility for…

This study used three experiments to study whether infant-directed (ID) or adult-directed (AD) speech facilitated the learning of Chinese vocabulary by adults whose native language was English and who had had no prior knowledge of Chinese. Results indicate that ID speech may play a pivotal role in early lexical acquisition. (51 references)…

Research shows that most conflicts between elementary children are rooted in some form of miscommunication. This article makes suggestions for warding off conflicts by improving communication skills, recommending that teachers first model good listening skills, then try several activities that help students practice careful communication skills…

This study evaluated the effects of practice with a referential communication task on the form and effectiveness of elderspeak, a speech register targeted at older listeners. The task required the listener to reproduce a route drawn on a map following the speakers' instructions. (Author/JL)

To investigate the relationship between speech and meaning, a word recognition study was conducted that required 20 beginning learners of Chinese to pronounce and later identify in English 46 Chinese words. The correlational analysis indicated a significant relationship between being able to pronounce and being able to identify Chinese words.…

Replies to C. M. Condit's responses to the authors' articles and comments advancing a communibiological paradigm. Argues that a general misidentification of the level of abstraction (paradigm not theory) drives Condit's complaints about communibiology, and outlines several misrepresentations of the authors' position. (SR)

Presents a method aimed at developing the ability of students to handle information, participate in group discussions, and accept and give constructive criticism. Involves synthesizing information in poster handouts and taking part in a student-centered assessment. Evaluates through an objective scoring strategy that leads to the identification of…

This study examined the effect of language on children's cognitive representation of number. The sample for the study consisted of 90 Arabic speaking children with a mean age of 80 months. Children were interviewed individually and asked to represent written two-digit numbers using base-10 blocks. A new approach for testing the linguistic…

This article uses an analysis of speech to qualitatively examine the relationship between a blind child and his environment, his use of semiotic signs, and his identity development. A brief overview of development in blind children is followed by a case study. The theoretical construct of this article, which is interactionism, is infused into the…

Background: In recent years, clinicians have been using a psycholinguistic approach to the assessment and remediation of children's developmental speech disorders. This requires the comparison of a child's performance across a range of speech-production tasks. Aims: To describe the profile of performance across different speech-production tasks in…

Though many cognitive abilities exhibit marked decline over the adult years, individual differences in rates of change have been observed. In the current study, biometrical latent growth models were used to examine sources of variability for ability level (intercept) and change (linear and quadratic effects) for verbal, fluid, memory, and…

This study investigated the use of beat gestures (typically the sharp up-and-down movement of the hand) in conjunction with L2 speech production. The L2 participant, although in conversation with another person, synchronized his beats with the parsing of his words into syllables. Based on Gal' perin's formulation for the process of…

The purpose of this study was to examine whether there are cultural differences in topic organization and role-related topic control in dinner conversations; such differences may function as a means for socialization into communicative styles. The research was designed as a comparative study of two geographically close but linguistically very…

An important learning opportunity occurs during the question and answer (Q & A) session following student speeches. Not only do students benefit from the information conveyed in these speeches, but students also benefit from the cognitive stimulation the opportunity affords. Often, however, it seems that the Q & A session falls short of these…

Speaking involves "linearizing" a message into a string of words. This process leaves us vulnerable to being interrupted in such a way that the aborted turn is a misrepresentation of the intended message. Further, because we linearize our messages in standard ways, we are recurrently vulnerable to interruptions at particular…