Proposes that communication strategies describe the learners' pattern of using what they know as they try to communicate with speakers of the largest language, and that communication strategies have an interactional function. Specific criteria are suggested for defining the notion of communication strategy as distinguished from learning and…

Shows that hesitation phenomena are intricately connected with propspective and retrospective speech production tasks and mark critical points in processing. Two major hesitation categories exist: stalls and repairs. Stalls head off errors and represent error-free output; repairs take care of errors already committed. English and German examples…

Proposes that arguments used popularly in religious controversies are historically stable and that the rhetorical critic's attention to topics or sources of reference ("topoi") for argumentation enhances the analysis of such controversies. Examines the Catholic debate over vernacular reform and emphasizes the relatively narrow range of "topoi"…

Significant correlations were obtained between Home Observation for Measurement of the Environment (HOME) Inventory scores and two clusters of items from the Bayley Scales of Infant Development: goal directedness and language use. HOME assessments were made when children were 6 and 12 months old; the Bayley was administered at 12 months.…

Reports three studies concerning individual differences in children's use of consonants during early phonological development. The findings indicate that these differences fall within a predictable range, that the linguistic environment cannot account for several of them, and that they are partly due to variations in the choice of lexical items.…

The mental activities of reading and responding to literature and the difficulties that occur as students try to produce written accounts of what they have gained are explored, as are the demands made on the student's language when putting into words what s/he has gained through a study of literature. (Author/KC)

Three prime time television situation comedies with primarily Black casts were studied for frequency and variations in use of Black English Vernacular (BEV). It is suggested that homogenization of BEV on American television reflects the attitude that BEV is not a legitimate language choice. (GC)

The study examined the adequacy of replacing generics with more gender neutral terms (e.g., someone or people) for 141 eight to eighteen year old hearing impaired students. Results showed that generally the neutral terms enabled students to limit masculine bias. (Author)

Presents data which shows, in a systematic and objective way, how the same speaker can express the same meaning in a variety of ways depending upon the social situation. Such data offer the teacher of English a basis for discussing some of the linguistic features involved in this variation. (Author/PJM)

Gives a syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, and discourse structure analysis of mothers' speech to children of 1;0, 1;8, 2;3, and 5;0 years, showing that the age of the child to whom mothers were speaking could be predicted very accurately from her speech. The changes in mothers' speech are responses to concurrent changes in children's language…

From an examination of the different meanings used for identical career education terms, the author lists fifteen key terms (categorized under time and effort, work content, and workplace structure) considered central to career development and education, identifies distinctive meanings, and proposes standard definitions for these key constructs.…

Discusses the preferences expressed in guides to language usage regarding the correlation of the adjectives "any,""each," and "every" with plural pronouns and possessives ("To each their own") in order to avoid allegedly sexist constructions ("To each his own"). (GT)

Demonstrates how French dictionaries from the seventeenth century onwards have used elimination or definition to censure certain words unacceptable to the bourgeois ideology of the times.

Discusses language use by males and females and about males and females across cultures, and describes a study which sought to test the claim that English terms such as "man" and "he" are sex-neutral. (AM)

Two experiments examined Lakoff's suggestion that men and women use different speech styles (women's speech being more polite and less assertive than men's). The effects of undergraduate students' use of three linguistic variables (tag questions, qualifiers, and compound requests) on person perception was tested. (CM)