The quality of mother-child linguistic interaction was studied in 40 6-year-old English children and their mothers. Both the middle and working classes were represented in the sample. Tasks were administered in which children were to ask questions of their mothers. Questions were analyzed in terms of open versus closed. The majority of the…

A survey of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's views on the phenomenology of language yields insight into the basic semiotic nature of language. Merleau-ponty's conceptions stand in opposition to Saussure's linguistic postulations and Korzybski's scientism. That is, if language is studied phenomenologically, the acts of speech and gesture take on greater…

To determine the effects of two facets of the adult's input in a child's acquisition of syntactic structures and vocabulary, fifteen classrooms of kindergarten, first, and second grade children from four middle socioeconomic class schools were assigned to either a literature group (which provided exposure to reading rich in varied syntactic…

The purpose of this investigation was to identify patterns of spelling errors among first grade children by classifying these errors in terms of their orthographic structure. The children were equally divided into low, middle, and high ability groups according to the number of words in their individual word banks as produced in their written…

This paper discusses some of the educational potential of psycholinguistic research. The first area discussed is the educational implications of the human capacity for acquiring language. Studies cited cover topics related to the universality of language acquisition, children's mastery of basic grammatical devices, neurophysiological states of…

To determine children's knowledge of the less frequent grammatical usages of words that may occur in more than one part of speech, lists of such words were developed. The grammatical functions of 1220 common words from two word counts were examined; about 50% were found to be grammatically ambiguous. Data were collected from about 1500 children in…

The effects of three types of pretraining in the use of syntactical verbal mediators on subsequent paired-associate performance were investigated. Subjects were 40 Negro and 40 white first graders randomly assigned to one of four groups. Condition 1 consisted of pretraining in both "mediation" instruction (experimenter gave subjects a sentence…

This study analyzes the sound correspondences of six Oceanic languages using reconstructed forms from Proto-Oceanic as a frame of reference. Sobei, Wakde, Masimasi, Anus, Bojgo, and Tarpia provide the cognates used in the analysis. Consonants and vowels are analyzed, and sound correspondences are examined for regularity of development and possible…

Various aspects of Arabic and Semitic linguistics are discussed in this text. The nine chapters include: (1) fundamental Semitic vocabulary and the classification of southern dialects; (2) observations on nominal derivation by affixation in several Semitic languages; (3) an automatic analysis of literary Arabic; (4) "Addad" and…

This research report examines the pronunciation that children give to synthetic words containing vowel-cluster spellings and analyzes the observed pronunciations in relation to common English words containing the same vowel clusters. The pronunciations associated with vowel-cluster spellings are among the most unpredictable letter-sound…

The thesis of this paper is that the "do so" test described by Lakoff and Ross (1966) is a test of the speaker's belief system regarding the relationship of verbs to their surface subject, and that judgments of grammaticality concerning "do so" are based on the speaker's underlying semantic beliefs. ("Speaker" refers here to both speakers and…

The two papers in this booklet comprise part of the research in the Hungarian-English Contrastive Linguistics Project, which is concerned with investigating the differences and similarities between the two languages with implications for second language acquisition. The first paper compares the obstruent clusters in English and Hungarian,…

This study of written language development and instruction of elementary school children found that realistic approaches are needed in teaching language usage, dialects, and registers. These approaches should include a nonrepetitive instructional system accounting for different linguistic abilities, a diagnostic evaluation of children's written…

The author considers the rule of negative transportation in English and discusses his ideas about such a rule in contrast to the theories set forth by Robin Lakoff. The rule of negative transportation allows the shifting of a negative, under certain conditions, from a lower clause into a higher one. The discussion centers around the occurrence of…

This paper presents a linguistic discussion of play-languages--designated as ludlings by the author and tentatively defined as the result of a transformation or a series of transformations acting regularly on an ordinary language text, with the intent of altering the form, but not the content of the original message, for purposes of concealment or…