The first half of this document reports on research that explores the ways in which knowledge of the world affects judgments of sentence acceptability. Sixty children in grades four through eight were studied at two times, one year apart. The subjects were first interviewed regarding their knowledge of the world in order to identify their role…

The ability to use language as a means of thought expression is a growth process. It is necessary, therefore, for college-level developmental courses to concentrate on strengths stemming from the student's communication in an informal environment, rather than on skill deficiencies reflected in test scores. To achieve this, the teacher must know…

The purpose of this paper is to examine the status of deictic reference in the speech of 19 three-year-old Black children. The deictic verbs of motion are examined with reference to other aspects of the deictic system. The data for this study are approximately eight hours of spontaneous speech collected in a pre-school classroom. The hypothesis to…

This paper discusses the role of language in early childhood education. The concept of Chomsky's generative grammar is explained briefly and the linguistic approaches of Piaget, Vygotsky and Whorf are compared with regard to the relations between cognitive structures and inner linguistic structures. An enigmatic discussion of language acquisition…

The linguistic state-of-the-art relevant to the construction of a battery of tests intended to yield language proficiency profiles of preschool children is surveyed in this paper. A basic assumption is that language data can be structured with a model that reflects stages in the development of control over phonological features, morphological…

A structured elicitation technique, convergent communication, was investigated as a means of constraining the range of linguistic data from children in K-3 without unduly constraining the naturalness of the conversation context. The convergent communication situation is a two-person problem-solving task which ensures that all communication is…

This paper presents a comprehensive, annotated guide to bibliographic materials related to bilingualism, with a particular focus on Spanish-English bilingualism. It is written in Spanish, to meet the needs of the student of language and literature who approaches the study of bilingualism with little prior contact with the research and literature…

The purpose of this research was to assess the validity of recent claims that experimenter-provided pictures facilitate young children's oral prose learning. The major question of interest was whether the pictures do nothing more than prompt the child to process the just presented information one more time, Three experiments were designed to test…

Linguistic models, especially the derivational theory of complexity, partially explain human comprehension of isolated sentences but not connected discourse. Two versions of a message, one entirely active sentences, the other entirely passive were written to compare transformational complexity. Subjects heard the messages at normal (150 wpm) rates…

Overlapping samples of 191, 142, and 87 undergraduates rated pairs of sentences for the frequency and acceptability of the syntactic constructions represented to investigate the feasibility of using such ratings in the study of syntactic forms. The results indicated that subjects are consistent in their judgments of both the frequency and…

Data from undergraduates' ratings of the frequency and acceptability of selected syntactic constructions are analyzed for linguistically defined sets. Mean ratings of frequency and acceptability as well as the results from a cluster analysis of each set of sentences are given for seven target contrasts: active/passive, may/might, perfect/past,…

The Japanese system of honorification shows respect either to the subject or to the direct or indirect object of the sentence. The selection of the polite or plain styles of speech determines the level of honorifics. The increase in mass communication and public speaking has led to a search for a reasonably polite but not old-fashioned or pompous…

This is a study of tense variation in "si"-clauses in Buenos Aires Spanish which basically consists of the substitution of the conditional for the imperfect subjunctive. The highest frequency of imperfect subjunctive shows up in +Contrary examples, while the conditional substitutes much more often in -Contrary examples. When the…

This book includes papers related to reading research from the International Reading Association's 1974 preconvention institute on research held in New Orleans. The introduction by Samuel Weintraub and Roger Farr discusses such questions as: Where does reading research need to be improved? What is research? What areas of reading research demand…

The principal aim of this study was to bring together three contemporary frameworks, general semantics, linguistic semantics in transformational theory, and speech acts in ordinary language philosophy, and to present their individual methods for analyzing the nature of meaning in language. The survey of these three systems forms the basis for a…