Studies the English-speaking and French-speaking populations of the Gaspe, focusing on socioeconomic status, mother tongue retention and bilingualism rates. This is followed by a detailed study of a small, linguistically mixed community in Gaspe East, reconstructing the community as it was in 1925 and describing it as it was in 1970. (Author/RM)

A sociolinguistic approach was utilized to describe the semantic-pragmatic component of language in the spontaneous communication of four hearing impaired preschool children. (Author)

Argues that technical writing teachers will profit from linguistic research if they keep in mind that linguists set their own goals, develop their own trends, and establish their own priorities, because these facts force technical writing teachers to consider their linguistic requirements before they turn to linguistic research for answers to…

Four keynote papers, presented at an international conference on sign language research, discussed general linguistic issues of sign language, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, and language acquisition. (CB)

Investigates the relevance of a Gricean model for accounting for coherent discourse in courts of law. Identifies 19 rules of discourse congruent with Grice's Cooperative Principle in transcripts of eight trials. However, finds courts must coerce participants to be cooperative. Concludes that Grice's theory does not account adequately for coherent…

Describes a study that examines the ability of children to identify given/new elements in passive and cleft forms in order to ascertain the relationship between syntactic and pragmatic acquisition. Results indicate that complete competence with these marked sentence forms does not occur universally until some time in adolescence. (SED)

Presents a brief theoretical statement on definition and then discusses a study of the development of definition in children aged 5 to 10. The development of definition is characterized as the gradual articulation of a conventional definitional form out of more general forms of ordinary oral discourse. (NCR)

Describes a study of how the interdependence of speech and gesture is realized in the course of motor planning and execution. Do the two systems operate interactively or do they operate in a ballistic or independent fashion? Four experiments showed that, for deictic expressions, the ballistic view is very nearly correct. (SED)

Describes experiments that examined the effects of orthographic similarity on lexical decisions and compared decision times to words when they are preceded by unrelated words. Results indicate that lexical decisions about spoken words were shown to be influenced by the spelling of an immediately preceding item. (SED)

Children ages 1 1/2 to 3 years were tested to determine their comprehension of the terms "in,""on," and "under." It was found that children who listened to a pretest story involving the objects to be used in the study showed markedly better comprehension of the terms than children not exposed to the pretest activity.…

Argues that pragmatics should expand its research interest to include not only the study of how speakers perform speech acts but also the investigation of instances where they decide not to perform them, referred to as the "opting out" choice. (CB)

Explores four major areas of differences between first- and second-language acquisition (completeness, equipotentiality, previous knowledge, and fossilization) and argues that the theory of Universal Grammar plays a much smaller role in explaining the second-language acquisition process than current research claims. (Author/CB)

Focused on the developmental acquisition of the conditional implication interpretation of "if-then." Knowledge of three aspects of this interpretation was assessed for adults and 3rd-, 5th- and 8th-graders. Results showed the older three groups were significantly more likely to understand conditional implication, with improvement…

Three experiments investigated children's acquisition of tense and aspect. Children aged 3-6 years watched and described actions of puppets. The vast majority used appropriate tense, with 3-year-olds using mainly simple past and 4-year-olds encoding most situations with the past progressive. (SKC)

The ISU/ChiLDES bibliographic database, a nonprofit computerized database dedicated to language acquisition, currently consists of nearly 1,900 annotated bibliographic references to journal articles dating back to 1972. (CB)