A study examined how languages affect memory for narrative. Forty bilingual children aged 8-9 listened to a story in either English or Greek, and then retold it in English or Greek. Unexpectedly, children who heard the story in English and retold it in Greek had significantly better story recall than other groups. Educational implications are…

This article explores young children's facility in phonological awareness tasks requiring either the detection or the articulation of head, coda, onset, and rime subsyllabic units shared in word pairs. Data are reported from 70 nonreading children and 21 precocious readers attending preschools. Prereading children were able to articulate shared…

We examined the development of some features of morphosyntactic ability, specifically the acquisition of auxiliaries and use of agreement marking, along with sentence processing capacity. We used a conceptually simple task called the Tags Question Task, which is a method for evaluating a number of language processes in the production of a commonly…

To set an optimal decision criterion on a test of recognition, a subject must estimate the degree to which they can discriminate previously studied from unstudied stimuli. To do so accurately, the subject must assess not only their mastery of the material but also the extent to which the distractors yield mnemonic evidence that makes them…

Few studies have examined characteristics of both verbal and written language of individuals with Alzheimer's disease (AD). This study used parallel measures (picture description, word fluency, spelling to dictation, and confrontational naming) to compare verbal and written language of individuals with mild AD, moderate AD, and normal controls (14…

It is argued that three misconceptions about language learning have limited the utility of performance objectives in individualized second language instruction. These misconceptions--confusion between competence and performance, inadequate identification of linguistic elements, and assumption that linguistic elements correspond to learning…

Type of discourse and syntax are related; speech researchers will have to specify type of discourse for their results to be comparable with other studies. (JH)

In order to study the syntactic components which operate in the imitation and recoding of standard English by bilingual and bidialectal children, a sample of 20 multiethnic Spanish speakers and 20 black English speakers was drawn from children in the first, second, and third grades of a metropolitan bilingual program. The ability of these children…

In its broadest sense, metalinguistic awareness refers to the study of or reflection upon language as an object--the form and structure of language rather than the content, the way in which the form expresses or relates to the message. One value of research on metalinguistic awareness lies in its potential for testing adult notions about the ways…

This paper presents a means of evaluating answers to comprehension questions by analyzing the oral language used in the answers to the questions according to the average number of words per communication unit, a measure of linguistic and cognitive growth, in order to determine the effectiveness of comprehension questions asked at two cognitive…

Some of the major studies by the proponents of the Derivational Theory of Complexity are reviewed in this paper, and the results of a study to determine the adequacy of the theory as an account of message processing difficulty are included. The subjects for the study were students selected from five sections of the introductory communication class…

The results of a project which investigated the speech of black respondents enrolled in the intermediate grades are described. From the data, materials and audio tapes were developed that could be used in helping preservice and inservice teachers identify morphological and syntactic features of black dialect. The concepts used in developing the…

Designed to be used as a measure of English language readiness to assist the classroom teacher in grouping native Spanish-speaking pupils for English language instruction, the index may also be used to assess pupil achievement in learning English as a foreign language. Based on a contrastive analysis of English and Spanish grammar and phonology,…

This report concerns a detailed analysis of syntax in speech samples collected from 69 lower-class black preschool children and 30 middle-class white preschool children. The objectives of the study were (1) to investigate the hypothesis that lower-class black children are deficient in their ability or propensity to produce syntactically elaborated…

This programmed teacher-training kit in applied linguistics for elementary and secondary teachers is designed for both individual and group in-service training. The kit consists of a workbook divided into four programmed workshops (attitudes affecting the image of the English teacher, language acquisition and testing; classroom methodology;…