This study focuses on the use of modes that are dependent on impersonal structures found in the French spoken in Quebec. Six impersonal structures are identified as causing modal variation in the subordinate. This variation is constrained mainly by linguistic factors. Social factors also influence the variation, but the amount of influence exerted…

A study examined the "oral" vocabulary used by newspapers over a 100-year period. Approximately 8,000 sentences containing about 200,000 words were chosen at random from the front pages of "The New York Times" and "The Los Angeles Times" for the period 1890-1989. Specific vocabularies were constructed for…

The oral interaction hypothesis, proposed by Long and investigated by Pica, in second language (L2) acquisition is critiqued. The interaction hypothesis advances two major claims about the role of interaction in L2 acquisition: (1) comprehensible input is necessary for L2 acquisition; and (2) modifications to the interactional structure of…

This digest focuses on measuring literacy in the United States. Various reports and surveys offer conflicting data on the extent of illiteracy, but it is generally agreed upon that the rates are alarmingly high. Information provided in this digest highlights the problem of defining literacy and the limitations of various approaches to measuring…

In order to investigate relationships between spoken and written language knowledge at a phonological level, linguistic theories of syllable structure that treat initial consonant clusters as units are first discussed. Second, experimental evidence is presented suggesting that analysis of initial clusters is difficult for both children and adults…

Language is both a reflection of the status quo and a factor in perpetuating the status quo. People use language to encode their own experiences; memories are the encoded versions of reality. People learn how to characterize their experience by seeing how others characterize their own and others' experiences. When asked to talk about successful…

The purpose of this master's degree project was to help teachers enhance children's language through the use of a variety of activities. Specifically, there were three stages to the project: (1) selection and preparation of a set of activities designed to elicit child language in each of several areas of the Tough classification of children's oral…

A study analyzed three episodes of self-repetition in a 1-year-old's utterances and examined the child's use of self-repetition for exploiting and elaborating on his phonological system in the context of discourse. The subject was a first-born monolingual child in the Stanford Child Phonology project. The analysis provides clues about how the…

The transformation that language undergoes when it becomes speech is examined in English. Statistical analysis of a representative sample of natural, informal speech reveals a number of characteristics of dynamic speech that distinguish it from static (citation form or pre-dynamic) linguistic form. It appears that in running speech, vowels and…

The availability of both oral and written historical narratives provides the Readers Theater adapter with a rich opportunity to experiment with mixing oral and written narrative styles in documentary form. Those who plan to use such mixing must consider the differences between oral and written narratives. Writers and readers have almost unlimited…

This is a report on the activities of the survey of spoken English at the University of Lund (Sweden), during the period 1975-81. The aim of the survey has been to make available in machine-readable form a corpus of material with its origin in speech. The corpus was built in conjunction with the survey of English usage project at the University of…

This study analyzes the quantity and quality of English used orally by 6-year-old Crow and Northern Cheyenne reservation Indian children. Interviews, conducted by American Indian teacher aides following a standardized interview guide, were recorded on cassette tapes. Random samples of the tapes were transcribed and analyzed for total utterances,…

This book is for boys and girls who know the numbers from one to thirty thoroughly, who can count to one thousand, who know something of the multiplication tables of two, three, four, five, six, ten, and twelve, and who understand the simplest facts about fractions. This book is both to be read and to be studied. It calls for oral recitation and…

This textbook is an elementary English course based upon two fundamental facts in regard to language: (1) the purpose of language is communication of thought; and (2) the use of language is an art. The book also provides a complete and progressive course of instruction in the use of the dictionary as an aid to both oral and written language.…

Children's use of proforms in spoken descriptions of real situations was studied and compared with that of adults to explore possible developmental progressions in the use of indexical reference. A discourse distinction between situational and textual reference was applied to data from 6-year-old and 10-year-old children and from adults. Subjects…