Describes a study designed to determine which sentence level errors by nonnative speakers of English are judged to be most serious by an academic community and to discover what factors may influence this judgment. Most respondents saw the errors in relative rather than absolute terms, forming an error hierarchy. (SED)

Describes a study which examines the relationship between context redundancy and keyword intelligibility in sentences having both high and low redundancy. Word pairs were placed in similar positions in two sets of sentences: sentence pairs that one might find in text, and adages together with sentences that might be spoken. (SED)

Describes a study of adult listeners' perceptions of infant babbling. Adult judges were unable to identify language background significantly above chance level. Findings do not support the babbling drift hypothesis which predicts that babbling begins to approximate characteristics of the mother tongue as infants approach meaningful speech. (SED)

Presents a "procedural view" of the learning mind, arguing against previous theories citing physical properties as its basis. A more process-oriented view of information processing is offered, which describes "mind" in terms of skill in manipulating symbols, and the notion of skills is shown to provide a useful framework for accounting for…

Investigates extent to which certain co-referential and structural constraints are reflected in the anaphoric noun phrases of written narratives of elementary school writers. Results indicate that poor writers are relatively insensitive to the constraints of the more difficult co-referential context, but that they (poor writers) are as sensitive…

Describes a study to examine the changes that take place in the form and types of discussions about the past as two young, Spanish-speaking girls moved from elicited routines to spontaneous and novel conversations about their past experiences. (HTH)

Describes three experiments that explored the informational roles of emphasis and word order in active sentences. The results, when considered together, strongly implicate recentness, but not emphasis, as an important means of linking temporally contiguous sentences. (HTH)

Presents a framework for expressing how choices are made in systemic grammars. Framework represents grammar as combination of systemic syntactic description and explicit choice processes called "choice experts." (DF)

Discusses the English grammar rule of backshifting in reported speech, that after a past tense reporting verb the reported verb is backshifted. However, backshifting need not always take place. Examination of numerous examples indicates that the past is the unmarked form; the unbackshifted present is marked, as is the past perfect. (SED)

Develops a method of analyzing and describing the acoustic properties of fricatives, which consists of making frequency spectra using the Fast Fourier Transform and then analyzing the spectra in terms of critical bands. The six fricatives of Chinese are analyzed by this method, and comparison with other languages is made. (SED)

Describes a study which compared the effects of three types of adult feedback (acceptance, correction with joint labelling, and correction with explanation) on young children's inappropriate word usage. Findings showed that correction with explanation was more effective than correction with joint labelling, which was more effective than simple…

Expands upon a previous study of the gender of Spanish nouns which indicated that feminine gender nouns typically end in unstressed -is, while other -s words are presumed masculine, with the most common masculine gender markers being -l, -o, -n, -e, and -r. (SL)

Proposes a model of syntax in which marked structures are conceived as the realization of modes of control that regulate the informational flow of the text at points of threatened discontinuity. Describes two of these modes, found in children's writing, which are concerned with relations of logic and focus. (Author/SED)

Reports on a study indicating children's dependency in oral persuasion on the cooperative nature of dialog and nonverbal vocalizations and their dependence in written persuasion on persuasive strategies found in speech that can be transferred to writing and, concomitantly, their relatively infrequent use of persuasive strategies specific to…

Discusses some of the basic issues of applied psycholinguistics (APL): the necessity for having a field called psycholinguistics, the specific object and scope of APL, the requirements that make it possible for such a field to exist and be developed, its theoretical basis, and methodological tools for research. (SED)