Thirteen manuscripts and extended reports on the nature of speech, instrumentation for its investigation, and practical applications of research are presented in this status report on speech research for the period of July-December 1979. The topics dealt with include speech perception, children's memory for sentences and word strings in relation…

A study originally involving 56 children from four schools was undertaken to observe the development of children's oral language and concepts of print during the kindergarten year using the Record of Oral Language (ROL) and the Concepts about Print (Sand) tests. In addition, the Sand test was administered early in the first grade to the available…

Children use simile and metaphor at an early age in both spontaneous oral language and written language. This study sought (1) to design an instrument to elicit children's spontaneous oral production of simile and metaphor, (2) to elicit such responses and examine the nature of the responses to different tasks and stimuli, (3) and to develop…

Use of French television commercials as a pedagogical tool has a great advantage over "two-dimensional" advertisements because they provide authentic and current spoken language which is often reinforced by repetitions and musical tunes as well as visual slogans on the screen. (CB)

Describes how a teacher used planned observations of classroom interactions to lead to role playing, class discussion, and changes in seating arrangements. The strategies resulted in marked improvements in classroom interactions and in academic work. (SKC)

An eight-month longitudinal study measuring infants' (N=8) temperament characteristics of activity level, task persistence, and affect and discourse and pragmatic features of their mothers' speech revealed complex interactions between maternal speech and infant temperament. It is argued that nonlinguistic child behaviors may influence maternal…

Provides an inventory of traditional techniques used in the teaching of pronunciation of English as a second language. Most of the techniques are production-oriented, for their purpose is to improve production of spoken English. (CB)

A combination of instructions, modeling, behavior rehearsal, and constructive feedback was used to train four visually-impaired young adult males to provide interviewers with positive personal and job-related information and to ask relevant questions during job interviews. (Author/CB)

Thirty-three congenitally physically disabled children, aged 4-6 and 14-16, were studied in order to define objective means for identifying children exhibiting the Cocktail Party Syndrome. A measure of the irrelevancy of language content was found to reliably distinguish such children from children of similar age and measured IQ. (Author/JDD)

Advanced (N=45) and intermediate (N=53) English as a second language (ESL) students' recall of a speaker's orally presented material indicated that student proficiency level, speaker gender, perceived expertness of speaker, and passage condition affected students' recall ability. (Author/CB)

Use of a seminar technique to improve the oral English communicative competence of Chinese postgraduate students in science and technology helped the students to learn foreign culture, science, and technology, as well as the foreign language, and helped them to lose their communication apprehension. (Author/CB)

Simulation of a situation (e.g., a hotel experience) emphasizing setting, role, and mood, helps students of intermediate French to use role play and to understand the causative structure in dialogue. (CB)

Analysis of basilang speech (in terms of word order, reference to time, and reference to space) of Chinese, Spanish, and Japanese speakers of English as a second language indicated that oriental subjects tended not to use prepositions and that Spanish-speaking subjects tended to use "in" to express most locative meanings. (Author/CB)

Phonetic and phonological analysis of spontaneous speech of six 2-year-old monolingual Puerto Rican Spanish-learning children revealed several sound usage patterns similar to those found in English and other language-learning children, supporting the claim that certain universal patterns exist in phonological development. (Author/CB)

College students (N=60) majoring in French, German, or Spanish took Self-Appraisal of Speaking Proficiency and State Anxiety Inventory before being assessed by American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages' Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI). Results showed that anxiety did not exert as much influence on scores as ability did. However, once…