Argues against Youssef's treatise which pointed out some difficulties in attempting to test Bickerton's language bioprogram hypothesis (LBH), contending that the treatise seriously misunderstood certain key concepts of the LBH and dismissed with questionable reasoning some important findings which supported the state/process distinction as a…

The study examined differences in the use of immediate echolalia by 18 children (ages 4-12) with autism at different stages of language development. Percentage of echolalic language was high at early stages of language development but decreased as language skills improved. (Author/DB)

The case study of a nine-year-old boy with autism suggested that his frequent repeated utterance "can I talk" served important social and communicative functions for the child who used the phrase as a compensatory strategy to ensure predictability within conversational exchanges while maintaining social interactions. (DB)

"Patterns of the Mind," by Ray Jackendoff, and "The Language Instinct," by Steven Pinker, are reviewed. Each are written to support the theory that language is predetermined by genetically endowed brain structure but also include discussions of studies that use sign language to confirm the standard model of linguistic theory. (Contains seven…

This study investigated whether phonological working memory was associated with spoken language development in 38 preschool children. Significant differences were found, with children who had good phonological memory abilities producing language that was more grammatically complex, contained a richer array of words, and included longer utterances…

Edwards (1992c) concerns data and data use rather than manuals. It presents principles to facilitate reliable archive research in an imperfect world. MacWhinney and Snow (1992) endorse the principles but disagree on important details, discussed in this response. (21 references) (KM)

Infants were trained to respond to vowel alterations. A total of 80 percent of the 2-, 3-, and 6-month-old infants in the sample did not respond when there was a change of pitch or speaker but no vowel change. The study established the feasibility of the observer-based psychoacoustic procedure. (BC)

Maintains that literacy studies can contribute to the general field of literary criticism. Uses George Bernard Shaw's "Pygmalion" as an introduction to the concept of literacy narratives, raising many questions about the process and politics of language acquisition. (SR)

Discusses John McCrone's book "The Ape That Spoke: Language and the Evolution of the Human Mind," highlighting the origins of language and the evolution of habits of thought. (SR)

Auditory evoked responses (AER) of 14 infants were recorded by means of scalp electrodes positioned over frontal, temporal, and parietal regions of each hemisphere before and after training in which nonsense bisyllables were used to name novel objects. Changes in two portions of AER waveforms were found to occur when a name was correctly paired…

Examines the consequences of the fact that human minds may know more than one language for the poverty-of-stimulus argument that speakers know more than they could have learned. The idea of multicompetence, the compound state of a mind with two grammars, is discussed. (22 references) (JL)

Three experiments presented nonsense verbs to two-year-olds either in syntactic isolation or embedded within a transitive syntactic frame. Found that children had identifiable action biases in the absence of syntactic information and that these biases were shifted by the addition of a transitive syntactic frame. (MDM)

Discusses why elephant riddles are viable catalysts for word play and language development in the primary grades. Explores some relationships between children's thinking and elephant riddles. Offers some suggestions for incorporating them as a regular part of the classroom flow. (SR)

Three studies examined the role of ontological and syntactic information in children's learning of words for physical entities, such as objects and substances. Results reveal a strong and changing developmental interaction for the use of ontologically relevant perceptual information, labels, and syntax. (Author/VWL)

Examines the use of introspection in applied linguistic research to raise critical language awareness. Provides an example of the author's diary to illustrate the social, cultural, and political processes that underlie language learning. Implications, including those for teaching methodology, for humanistically oriented language educators are…