This study examines some variables that may affect two aspects of syntax in Head Start children; the use of descriptors and the use of complete sentences. Thirty-six children were assigned to six experimental conditions in a design which varied adult verbal modeling, feedback, and sex. Children given adult verbal modeling produced significantly…

Anthropologist Melville Herskovits, in the section on language of his book "The Myth of the Negro Past" (1941), gives one of the first scientific orientations to the study of black speech in the United States. His basic contribution was to establish the following main points: (1) that the black people in the New World came from regions…

A contrastive analysis of some phonological, morphological, and syntactical differences existing in French and English are cited along with suggestions for teaching each variation by the systematic approach. Also discussed briefly are such language interference problems as auditory discrimination of segmental and supra-segmental phonemes,…

The oral language differences between Negro and Puerto Rican youngsters were compared in the hope that the study would be relevant to curriculum modifications for specific populations. Subjects (Ss) were five Negro and six Puerto Rican third grade girls in inner city classrooms. The facility of Ss in language use independent of vocabulary and…

Seeking out inter-language differences in the execution of a contrastive analysis is given priority over looking for manifestations of language universals. But unless a contrastive study is based upon an understanding of language universals and contains a set of instructions for how each language realizes them, the common ground for contrast can…

Four researchers discussed their studies of oral reading miscues within a round-table format. After each participant's description of the specific concerns and procedures of his study, the following topics were discussed: description and analysis of the miscue, correction strategy, relationship of the child's language to the language of the…

This report concerns a detailed analysis of syntax in speech samples collected from 69 lower-class black preschool children and 30 middle-class white preschool children. The objectives of the study were (1) to investigate the hypothesis that lower-class black children are deficient in their ability or propensity to produce syntactically elaborated…

This report asserts that the evaluation of young children can be viewed as a classic case of evaluation of the culturally different. Emphasized is the fact that not only are the majority of tests developed with an adult's perspective concerning adequacy of directions, items, and formats, but also the evaluation of the products is carried out…

The Mapuches, a tribe now numbering about 500,000 people in south central Chile are the descendants of the Araucanians of Spanish legend. Many still speak only their own idiom, which now shows much lexical influence of the surrounding Spanish. This paper is an exposition of Maria Catrileo Chiguailaf de Godo's research in her native language. It…

The thesis that classroom instruction in the grammatical forms of a language is undesirable, currently held by a number of applied linguists, is rejected. However, although it has been found that inducement of grammatical consciousness is not necessarily a pedagogical liability, its worth depends to a large extent upon the kinds of facts to be…

The purpose of this study was to describe the syntactical complexity of the level of English which is easily understood and freely used by a selected group of bilingual Sioux Indian children. The study was designed to determine a basis for a lack of language fluency as a contributing factor in the cross-over phenomenon of these Indian children in…

By offering solutions to long-standing problems like quantification, relativization, topicalization, and negation in Korean syntax, the present dissertation aims to show the limitations of any approach which concentrates on the sentence as a linguistic unit or which takes semantics to be interpretative. One possible solution suggested here is a…

A description of the linguistic characteristics of casual conversations of Los Angeles Negro K-3 school children was recorded outside the classroom in small groups with two to five participants. Analysis of phonological, syntactic, and lexical characteristics discloses considerable variation in the children's speech, exhibiting both a significant…

A detailed view of the various uses in Russian of the conjunction "poka" is developed in this article. Frequent examples illustrate clausal relationships, negative constructions, aspect, and tense in typical "poka" constructions. The principal function of "poka" is related to the linguistic concept of simultaneity, and the standard dictionary…

It is possible to apply the concept of surface-structure constraint to a particular area of Hungarian syntax. A surface-structure constraint, according to David Perlmutter, can be seen as a template which serves as a filter at some level after the transformational component. In the case of Hungarian cooccurrence of noun phrases and verbs in a…