Describes a three-month French workshop for teachers and doctors in Shanghai, the goals being the improvement of speaking, comprehension and writing skills. (Text is in French.) (CLK)

Children with learning disabilities tend to score below the mean on measures of oral language, but not all do. (HOD)

Examined mothers' provision of novel and familiar toy animals during play interactions with infants at ages 0;10, 1;1, 1;5, and 1;9. Analyses indicated that mothers facilitated their children's determination of reference and differentially adjusted their naming practices to novel, comprehended, and familiar animals. Results indicate that maternal…

The development of the speech production system was investigated among 120 children (ages 4-14 years) and 20 adults. Aerodynamic and acoustic results suggest that men and 14-year-old boys function differently than women and all other groups of children. Data generally suggest that laryngeal and respiratory behavior of children is not easily…

Focuses on two primary meanings of the term interaction in the second-language (L2) context: face-to-face interaction in which two or more people create meaning, and the creative interaction between the reader and the text. Argues that many claims related to the value of L2 spoken interaction can apply equally well to L2 reading. (94 references)…

Investigates administrative training and leadership practices used by communication department chairpersons. Examines the number of women chairpersons, differences in administrative training activities for men as compared to women chairpersons, and whether leadership practices differ according to length of term, gender, institution size,…

Details speech acquisition process of first British, congenitally deaf infant without other handicaps to be fitted with a cochlear implant, noting the utility of Ling's model of speech acquisition. Notes that following implant, subject showed pattern and timing of acquisition of spoken words comparable to that of normally hearing infants or of…

Analyzes critical incidents provided by professional interpreters. Findings indicate three major roles interpreters play: editor, cultural coach, and monitor/checker. The article discusses the implications of these roles in order to make the international executive an informed consumer of interpretation services. (13 references) (Author/CK)

This study investigates the phenomenon that listeners of English were surprisingly accurate at predicting the temporal end of a sentence when only given the part up to the "potentially last word," that is a noun before an optional prepositional phrase of varying lengths. Results of four experiments using either French or English are given. (35…

Endorses the position that fabricated discourse presented as nonfictional in nature is a model of ordinary talk, which is relied upon to convince an audience of its verisimilitude. The purpose of the article is to document the strategies used in a puppet show, "The Sooty Show," and to demonstrate their effectiveness in generating a sense…

Reviews Deborah Tannen's collection of essays, "Gender and Discourse." The review maintains that this collection is padded with anecdotes but provides little evidence of the research supposedly underlying this work. It is concluded that what is needed in a discussion of gender and discourse is a methodology in which linguistic features…

Proposes a method of analyzing the spontaneous speech of severely agrammatic patients. The method employed involves the description and analysis of a male patient's video-recorded conversation with a speech therapist. Preliminary conclusions indicate the presence of some linguistic mechanisms underlying normal syntactic processing. (32 references)…

This study compared the prosodic characteristics of parental language targeted to children with Down syndrome and children with other etiologies of mental retardation. Results showed that parents of children with Down syndrome showed prosodic characteristics more typical of infant-directed speech than did parents of other children with mental…

This article describes the current training and certification procedures in place for linguistic interpreters, the continuum of interpreter roles, and how interpreters' perspectives may influence the interpretive interaction. The specific skills needed for interpreting in either health care or educational settings are identified. A table compares…

Two experiments involving 30 young adults with normal hearing examined how speaking mode (clear vs. conversational) and presentation mode (auditory vs. auditory-visual) influence the perception of words within nonsense sentences. Results indicate clear speech was easier to understand than conversational speech and auditory-visual presentations…