The discussion throughout this paper is devoted to answering the question: What is the nature of our knowledge of language and what theoretical assumptions does the answer entail for linguistic description? Discussed are--(1) what it means to know a language, (2) the distinction between linguistic competence and performance, (3) justification of…

Selected aspects of early phonological development are described, and eight important characteristics are suggested. It is held that the child plays a highly active, creative role in the acquisition process. The child's early vocables constitute a connecting link between babbling and adult-modeled speech; the child's phonological systems for…

The purpose of this study was to investigate differences among four oral language elicitation probes used to collect language samples from young children. Ten kindergarten, ten first-grade, and ten second-grade children provided the oral language samples. Each class was divided by sex, and five boys and five girls from each grade were randomly…

Spanish and English versions of a 38-item grammar test were administered to 40 Spanish-surnamed pupils equally divided by sex at grade levels K, 1, 3, and 5 (10 subjects per grade) in a bilingual education program. The test was a revision of part of an earlier test for oral proficiency in Spanish and English. The reliability of the new test was…

A native speaker of a language possesses both grammatical and rhetorical competence. A grammatical model, in its deep structure, represents an "is a" relationship. It seeks to offer some explanation of a human being as a human being. A rhetorical model represents a "counts as" relationship. It seeks to offer some explanation of…

This study was designed to explore the influences of visual context upon sentence comprehension in young children. Three-, four-, five-, and six-year-old children were presented with various linguistic tasks under varied visual context constraints. Four context conditions--no visual context, a helpful pictured context, a helpful visual context…

A study was undertaken to determine how much knowledge children have of grammatical systems before they evidence the systems in their spontaneous speech in a productive way. A child aged about two and a half years was examined over several months through elicited imitation causing him to repeat a model sentence immediately after the researcher.…

This investigation studied the relationships of children's reading achievement to their ability to reproduce orally selected phonological, morphological, and syntactical structures presented in "The Gloria and David Beginning English, Series No. 20, Test 6" (GDBE). The subjects were 198 Spanish-surnamed and black third graders. Reading achievement…

Morphological features in the speech of Southern white and Negro students at four grade levels were studied by an instrument designed to test the students' knowledge of fifteen inflectional endings (including the allomorphs of the regular plural, singular possessive and third person singular present, absence of the plural possessive, and the…

Discussed in this paper are reasons why people who speak second languages may not speak or write them with native-speaker-like fluency. These second-language deficiencies may be the results of (1) interference, the use of aspects of another language at a variety of levels; (2) strategies of learning such as over overgeneralization and analogy by…

The effects of certain linguistic dimensions on auditory blending performance and training were examined. Dimensions included type of phonological context, consonant-vowel or vowel-consonant (CV or VC); units to be blended, syllables or phonemes (S or P); and size of units, single or double. Six ordered 96-word training blends were administered to…

This paper considers the existing evidence of systems of co-occurring, sex-linked, linguistic signals in the United States. In the first section, the type of research which has been done in linguistic sex contrasts and then the relevant material in "folk linguistics" are discussed. In addition, a number of studies about the differences among men…

The syntactical speech characteristics of black children living in depressed areas of an Eastern city were compared with the eight identified by Baratz, i.e., absence of "s" in the third person singular, zero copula, double negation and "ain't," zero past marker, zero possessive marker, zero plural marker, the substitution of "did" or "can" for…

The model in this study illustrates a theory of the language user's performance based on an analysis of the fundamental speech episode, the dialogue. The model presents an outline of conditions for the description of strategic aspects of communication within a dynamic framework, which are dependent on the orientation of the communicator toward a…

This paper is an attempt to claim that teaching English as a foreign language (TEFL) can be an autonomous discipline and that it needs to be a single discipline instead of bits and pieces of related sciences put together. A workable theory of TEFL could have its basis on the general framework of communication. What is needed is an integrated…