Disagrees with recommendations made by developmental spelling researchers who advocate radical change in spelling instruction. Discusses flaws in developmental spelling research and questions researchers' advice to classroom teachers. (DR)

Abilities of 2-, 5-, and 7-year-old children to interpret, judge acceptability of, and produce class extensions were assessed. It was concluded that increasing ability to deal appropriately with class extensions is primarily due to general advances in language acquisition rather than to any development unique to the class-extension word-formation…

Regardless of the syntactic variation of the direct object "a" in Spanish, a great deal of semantic unity underlies its use. Argues that it carries an invariant meaning that is present in every use of the form, and, concomitantly, its absence before a direct object carries an equally invariant meaning within the systematic semantic structure of…

Analyzes early lexical and phonological development in three children from late babbling through the acquisition of 50 conventional words. Focuses on (1) the relationship between prelinguistic and linguistic vocalizations, (2) phonological development after the onset of speech, (3) patterns of lexical selection, (4) rate of lexical acquisition,…

The acquisition of "to" in infinitive complement structure was examined in the spontaneous speech data from four children who were observed longitudinally from two to three years of age. Results support the conclusion that the verb system is a determining factor in the acquisition of linguistic structure. (SED)

Describes acoustic analysis of the speech of a child from 46 to 149 weeks in which overall word duration, pitch perturbation, and within-word phonetic segments were measured. The subject's overall word duration decreased considerably at a relatively late stage, supporting the claim that a child's neuromuscular control improves with maturation.…

Semiotics, the theory of signs and symbols and their function in languages, is described with reference to its history, theoretical branches of study, scope, and uses. (MSE)

Explores the processing implications of bi-scriptalism. (EKN)

Spatial relationships represented by po + dative case in Russian may be analyzed as underlying locations. The directionality sometimes present in po + dative sentences is due to the cooccurrence of the directional (determined) verb of motion and not to an underlying relation goal. (SL)

Expands on Ochsner's (1979) call for a "bilingual" attitude toward second language acquisition research. Suggests work be viewed as science and art in order to better understand what we do and how we do it. Argues that theorists use artistic and scientific devices in building theories, and consumers of those theories use aesthetic and…

Describes the fundamentals of Japanese braille and outlines the spacing rules now in general use. Points out the relevance of Japanese braille for the computer treatment of the Japanese language. (FL)

Refutes the assumption on which most second language research is based--that language is intended by its speakers to transfer information to some interlocutor--by responding to Tomlin's paper in the same journal, "The Treatment of Foreground-Background Information in the On-Line Descriptive Discourse of Second Language Learners."

Discusses using redundancy in language as a means of facilitating second-language learning. (EKN)

Examines the conditions under which children and adults use indexical words to refer to objects or to corefer with nouns in discourse. Subjects at three ages (6, 10, and adult) performed simple tasks and described their actions. (Author/AS)

Discusses the effects on native speaker comprehension of familiarity with: (1) topic, (2) nonnative speech in general, (3) a nonnative accent in particular, and (4) a particular nonnative. Results indicate that the most important variable is familiarity with topic, although the others all have a facilitating effect in comprehension. (EKN)