Reports on student perceptions of classroom discourse, which includes speech between teacher and students as well as among peers. Students indicate both observations of frequency and value judgments. Responses are analyzed by their final course grade. Results are intended to guide future formal and informal observational studies on how relative…

Offers a sustained linguistic analysis of James Fenimore Cooper's "The Last of the Mohicans." Finds that, because Cooper's technical blunders and moral limitations are always in view, they are revelatory. Suggests that no American author has gotten more things wrong about languages; but no one has dramatized more about how languages…

Basque auxiliary verbs encode tense, agreement relations with ergative, absolutive, and dative arguments, which constitute an inflectional verbal amalgam whose acquisition is not problematic for Spanish-speaking children but is for Spanish-speaking adults. This asymmetry is due to different processes by which the inflectional amalgam is acquired.…

Examines the use of gender-distinctive language in preschool sibling conversations, focusing on mitigation in directives and related forms used during pretend play. Findings indicate that gender-distinctive patterns of language use are sensitive to variations in situation and interaction partner. (19 references) (CK)

This article reviews recent investigations of the development of phonology, morphology, semantics, and pragmatics in the development of speech and language by African American children. Clinical implications are offered to aid the distinction between normal language development using features of African American English and language disorders.…

Proposes an alternative account of the child's learning of nouns and adjectives that relies on properties of the semantic categories to be learned and of the word-learning task itself. In five experiments, a simple connectionist network was trained to label input objects in particular contexts; the network learned categories resembling nouns…

Presents evidence from studies on adults' language processing and children's language acquisition that the lexicon is at the core of grammatical generalizations at several levels of representation. Proposes that phonological acquisition might provide the bootstrapping into grammatical generalization in general. Concludes that age-appropriate…

These case studies describe and compare the language characteristics of two bilingual children (age 7), one with specific language impairment (SLI). Results found the child with SLI produced significantly more morphosyntactic errors and less variety of grammatical forms and sentence types in both languages, and demonstrated significant…

Evaluates the use of the multiple intelligences (MI) theory explaining that teachers must critically reflect about the means for introducing MI into the music classroom and consider the integrity of music learning above all. Investigates various types of MI activities that teachers traditionally integrate into their classrooms. (CMK)

A study analyzed the oral narrative abilities in Caucasian males (ages 8-13) identified as aggressive. The boys were asked to construct an oral narrative based on a wordless picture book. Subjects provided fewer pieces of information to create the setting of the story for listeners than did controls. (Contains references.) (Author/CR)

This descriptive study analyzed the emergence of the imperfect in the written production of 30 beginning learners of Spanish. The analysis focused on the use of the imperfect and the morphological marking of state verbs. The results follow the patterns predicted by the aspect hypothesis (Andersen and Shirai, 1994), and support some refinements of…

All languages rely to some extent on word order to signal relational information. Why? We address this question by exploring communicative and cognitive factors that could lead to a reliance on word order. In Study 1, adults were asked to describe scenes to another using their hands and not their mouths. The question was whether this home-made…

Five experiments investigated the interpretation of quantified noun phrases in relation to discourse structure. They demonstrated, using questionnaire and on-line reading techniques, that readers in English prefer to give a quantified noun phrase in (VP-external) subject position a presuppositional interpretation, in which the noun phrase limits…

Over the past decade, the importance of multiword lexical units has been receiving an extraordinary amount of attention, and is now almost a must-have component in the practice of English language teaching. The field of English for Business Purposes was among the first to recognize the uniqueness of multiword units, establishing the initial…

This paper discusses findings from an extensive project examining gender, language and computer-mediated communication (CMC) in the context of undergraduate psychology courses. The contributions of 197 introductory psychology students (148 females, 49 males) participating in asynchronous CMC as part of their course were collated and coded for…