Reviews research on counselor profanity and provides guidelines for its use in counseling. Discourages use of profanity with children; discusses profanity to establish rapport, in later sessions, to reach deeper levels of affect, to help clients focus. Considers counselor's personal value system and offensiveness of profanity to clients.…

As part of an argument for social and textual views of literacy, this review summarizes some of the accomplishments and shortcomings of constructivist accounts of reading and writing activity. A rhetorical perspective calls attention to the way language use crystallizes relations between readers and writers. (SLD)

In a study of event knowledge, 13 2-year-olds were observed interacting with their mothers over a 5-month period. Results indicated that children's increasing event knowledge facilitated their language development (e.g., lexical type use, action verb use) and their lexical token use. (Contains 33 references.) (Author/LB)

This article compares three models of morphological storage and processing: (1) the dual-processing model of Pinker, Marcus and others; (2) the connectionist model of Marchman, Plunkett, Seidenberg, and others; and (3) the network model of Bybee and Langacker. Type frequency of a morphological pattern is shown to be important in determining…

Examines the rhymes and linguistic tricks used by children, focusing on the rhyme, syllable structure, word boundaries, rhythm, meaning, and social uses of school children's poetry and rhymes. Examples are provided of various past and current poems and rhymes. (Contains 10 references.) (MDM)

Examines the distinctive dialect of the British royal family, as well as the "advanced" Received Pronunciation (RP) of the British upper class. Particular focus is on usages, such as the royal "we" and "one," as well as intergenerational differences among RP speakers. (Contains 21 references.) (MDM)

Individuals with autism without mental retardation (ages 8-18), Asperger syndrome, and nonspecific social problems (controls) engaged in a 10-minute conversation. Compared to controls, the higher functioning autistic group referred less to a previous stretch of the conversation and more to an aspect of the physical environment. The Asperger group…

Some recent studies on question formation in formal and informal spoken French are summarized and evaluated, and a number of first- and second-year textbooks published since 1986 are evaluated regarding their treatment of question formation. Recommendations are offered for teaching strategies. (Contains 33 references.) (LB)

Spontaneous utterances from 3 conversational contexts were generated by 3 groups of 10 children, including children with specific language impairments (SLI), and analyzed for accuracy of pronoun usage. Results indicated that children with SLI exhibited more total errors than chronological peers but not more than their language level peers. A…

Discusses the eight-month examination of interactive student-teacher journal entries of first-, third-, and fifth-grade Spanish-English bilingual classrooms. Concludes that students did not make a "transition" from native to second language, instead used a bilingual approach, shifting language in journal entries. Suggests mandatory…

Four experiments examined three- and four-year olds' interpretations of novel words applied to familiar objects in the sentence frame "This Y is X," where X is a novel word and Y is a familiar count noun. Results indicated that preschoolers understood that the novel words were either proper names or adjectives/mass nouns. (MDM)

This study used interviews and participant-observation to examine the concept of "brown-nosing" (using compliments and other positive statements to curry favor) in organizational settings in the United States. It identifies various types of brown-nosing, as well as the motives and consequences of such behavior. (30 references) (MDM)

This article suggests that the notion of "conceptual fluency," which has been derived from the current research on the role of metaphor in language and cognition, can be used to draft a teaching curriculum around the notion that metaphor is the organizing principle of common discourse. (51 references) (MDM)

Makes a case for using transliteration in order to avoid wholesale translation of new words from the natural sciences and technology into Indian languages. Proposes introduction of the Roman alphabet (in a modified form), so that the Indian languages can accommodate new loans within their own phonetic systems without any substantial changes. (SR)

Applies techniques of conversational analysis and sociolinguistics to provide an ethnographic account of a mediation in Thailand. (48 references) (LB)