This book addresses African American identity and communication and articulates how African Americans define themselves and membership in their group as well as how they percent intra- and inter-ethnic communication. Communication is viewed as a socially constructed process that revolves around membership in ethnic cultures. They explicate core…

A certain group of English verbs, the ergatives, is consistently mis-passivized in Chinese-speakers' interlanguage. Comparison of the ergative construction in Chinese and English shows that they share similar properties. However, this does not seem to facilitate learning of the target English construction. Furthermore, the passive ergatives are…

this study, an analysis of poetry in Tina Sambal, a Philippine language spoken by about 70,000 persons in northern Zambales province, looks at the characteristics of the different poetic genres and poetic conventions followed in writing songs and poems. Primary emphasis is on phonological restrictions, grammatical liberties, and semantic…

It is suggested that contrastive linguistics, the systematic comparison of two languages, be considered in the preparation of instructional materials and as a choice of teaching methods and techniques for training tranlators and interpreters. The contrastive analysis hypothesis suggests that the major source of errors committed by learners of a…

Notes that from the age of Booker T. Washington to the post World War II Freedom Movement, the term 'Negro', the spanish word for 'black' was the one designation for people of African descent most widely accepted; and discusses the campaign waged by blacks during this period to win acceptance of the practice of spelling 'negro' with a capital 'N'.…

An approach to written composition built upon knowledge of the linguistic environments of inner-city blacks is described.

A reading program will succeed if it is based on the following positive aspects: children's oral language competence, understanding of the reading process, a lot of time spent in reading, and positive teacher attitudes. (JH)

An exercise developed to aid an aphasia patient in relearning rules governing phonological changes in English was later used in a pilot study attempting to teach English pronunciation to French speakers by rule rather than by rote. The method used and the results obtained are reported. (RM)

The study evaluated the effects of an auditory monitoring and feedback approach on an adolescent boy's schizophrenic language patterns. The approach attempted to increase the subject's auditory awareness and to train him to identify and correct the linguistic errors of others and, eventually, of himself. Language samples were analyzed at baseline…

Recently, a number of quantitative studies have explored systematic relationships between sociocultural organization and patterns of language use, based on the assumption that speech behavior reflects the basic categories of the community's social structure. Such systematic links were arrived at by correlating average group scores for…

The recognition of linguistic stereotypes based on gender and actual speech production were examined in 10 four-year-old and 10 six-year-old children. Eight linguistic forms were presented to the children in two different contexts in a story. After each sentence containing one of the forms, the children were asked whether a boy or girl had spoken,…

Impromptu speech can be defined in different ways: in terms of situational context, linguistic characteristics, and real-time processing. These approaches are not contradictory. There are certain situations that call for rapid processing of spoken discourse, and the needs of that processing are reflected in the structure of the text. The degree of…

By analyzing the lexicology of natural language (English or other languages as they are commonly spoken or written), as compared to computer languages, this study explored the extent to which syntactic and semantic levels of linguistic analysis can be implemented and effectively used on microcomputers. In Phase I of the study, the Apple IIe with…

Analysis of the basic and alternative word order patterns of spoken and written modern Breton confirms it as a consistent VSO (verb, subject, object) language, possessing the principal operator/operand features posited for such languages, rather than having predominantly SVO word order as some recent research has suggested. However, as most…

A discussion of discourse patterns in the professional interactions of lawyers and physicians suggests that these encounters are programmatic exchanges to which the psycholinguistic rules of processing and inference can be applied. In these professions, the constraints of normal discourse patterns interact with the conventions of giving and…