The decontextualized nature of literacy has been a recurrent issue in discussions of the consequences of literacy over the last twenty years. The central thesis of these discussions is that the nature of written discourse itself leads directly or indirectly to changes in cognitive processing, linguistic progressing, cultural development, and/or…

This is a longitudinal study of a child's acquisition of Mandarin phonology between the ages of 1;2 and 2;8. During this period, the child was much less verbal than many children reported in other child phonology studies. The study consists of two parts. The first part is a description of the child's "proto-language," in which he used…

This book is designed to assist those who work with non-English dominant students by providing resource information relevant to second language teaching and learning. The articles in the series encompass both theory and practical learning techniques in six general topics. The articles in the first text of the series, concerning background and…

The question is addressed whether a child would develop a communication system if a conventional linguistic model is absent. Six congenitally deaf children, who were not exposed to Sign Language, were observed and videotaped at play in their homes at intervals of one to three months. The children ranged in age from 1 year, 5 months to 4 years, 1…

This report presents some of the findings of several years research on the relations between the non-standard English used by Negro speakers in various urban ghetto areas (NNE) and standard English (SE). The immediate subject is the status of the copula and auxiliary "be" in NNE. The approach to the problem combines the methods of…

Bilingual and monolingual children were presented with experimental conditions where response mode and semantic information was varied. Forty children, 20 in each language-type group, responded in the present progressive and the past tenses to a series of colored drawings of simple activities. Half of the subjects responded to the task under…

In the first part of this paper several theories on the subject of communicative competence are examined. Part 2 is devoted to a discussion of how a teacher can test for communicative competence, and the practicality of this type of testing, in terms of class time, equipment required and objective grading, is emphasized. Part 3 summarizes a number…

What has been called bilingual education in this country presently has as its sole concern the linguistic performance of the student, thereby neglecting the implementation of a coherent conceptual system which takes into consideration the ways in which the student comes to understand the world around him. Furthermore, bilingual education has not…

This paper on intervention research critically reviews evaluations of experimental procedures designed to effect changes in the language development of disadvantaged children. It includes a summary of intervention projects and survey of present knowledge and theory about language which constitute the rationale for such projects. Specific…

This final report gives the findings of a government research project, the broad objective of which was to determine the existence of heightened covert oral behavior in the performance of tasks in which the response class had not yet been empirically studied and to ascertain the function of the covert oral response. Areas covered by this report…

The occurrence of the two allomorphs of the indefinite article in standard English ("a" before nouns or noun clauses beginning with consonant sounds and "an" before those beginning with vowel sounds) is a concept similar to those studied in the general concept formation paradigm. The acquisition of this grammatical concept was examined using 80…

This study was designed to determine (1) the relevance of a child's "language map"--his expressed attitude toward reading as developed by early experiences with reading material and oral reading--to his potential reading achievement and (2) the accuracy of a previously developed instrument for measuring the "language map" and thus the semantic…

This article explores the question of whether language teachers are capable of ascertaining student acquisition of grammatical rules when the lesson is taught orally. Oral fluency is seen as the foundation of the language process,and a distinction is made between productive and reproductive speech. Frequent use of examples illustrates linguistic…

This annotated bibliography lists approximately 100 books, reports, Rand memoranda, and papers, written between 1961 and 1971, in the fields of linguistic theory, language research, computational linguistics, and formal linguistics. Many documents involve the use of computers in problems of language analysis; many concern the analysis of Russian.…

Recent research in experimental phonetics seems to provide evidence for a clear division between language units and speech units. Many researchers have suggested that the consonant-vowel (CV) syllable may be a universal unit of speech production and perception, while language units become criterial only at higher levels of processing. In second…