A REPORT OF A CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH IN SPEECH AND HEARING FOR MENTALLY RETARDED CHILDREN IS PRESENTED. THE MAIN AREAS INCLUDED ARE THEORETICAL APPROACHES TO LANGUAGE AND COMMUNICATION, PROCEDURES FOR MEASURING LANGUAGE, AND SPECIAL METHODS FOR TREATMENT. SPECIFIC REPORTS GIVEN ARE--"PSYCHOLINGUISTICS IN THE STUDY OF MENTAL RETARDATION"…

THE PURPOSE OF THIS STUDY WAS TO INVESTIGATE THE INFLUENCE OF PHONETIC, SYNTACTIC, AND SEMANTIC DIALECT DIFFERENCES ON COMMUNICATION BETWEEN PERSONS FROM DIFFERENT DIALECT COMMUNITIES. THE THREE HYPOTHESES UPON WHICH THE STUDY WAS BASED STATED THAT PHONETIC, SYNTACTIC, AND SEMANTIC FEATURES OF DIALECT DIFFERENCES WOULD EACH CONTRIBUTE TO…

THE EFFECT OF EXPOSURE TO FRENCH IN THE ELEMENTARY GRADES (FLES) ON LATER LANGUAGE PROFICIENCY AND PERFORMANCE IN FRENCH COURSES IN HIGH SCHOOL WAS EVALUATED. ONE GROUP OF 17 HAD BEEN GIVEN ABOUT 1 HOUR A WEEK OF AUDIOLINGUAL TRAINING BEGINNING IN GRADE 3. THE OTHER GROUP OF 15 BEGAN FRENCH IN GRADE 9. BOTH GROUPS WERE ADMINISTERED THE MLA…

THIS ARTICLE TRACES THE ORIGIN AND EVALUATION OF A SPECIAL FOREIGN LANGUAGE TRAINING CONCEPT THAT EVOLVED OUT OF A SPECIFIC MILITARY NEED TO INTERROGATE NEWLY CAPTURED PRISONERS OF WAR TO ACQUIRE IMMEDIATE TACTICAL INFORMATION. THROUGH AN INITIAL FEASIBILITY STUDY, A REASONABLE SET OF VERBAL MATERIALS WAS SELECTED AS COURSE CONTENT, AND A…

THE AUTHOR STATES THAT BEFORE PRESENT FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHING METHODS CAN BE DISCUSSED INTELLIGENTLY, THE RESEARCH IN PSYCHOLOGY AND LINGUISTICS WHICH HAS INFLUENCED THE DEVELOPMENT OF THESE METHODS MUST BE CONSIDERED. MANY FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHERS WERE BEGINNING TO FEEL COMFORTABLE WITH THE AUDIOLINGUAL APPROACH WHEN NOAM CHOMSKY, IN HIS 1966…

THE EFFECTIVENESS OF A TASK ANALYSIS APPROACH IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE LEARNING WAS STUDIED. SPECIAL SPANISH MATERIALS DEVELOPED FOR THE PROJECT INVOLVING 1,000 STUDENTS CONSISTED OF PROGRAMED HOMEWORK FOR EACH LESSON, A STUDENT TEXT OF READING MATERIALS, AND A DETAILED SET OF LESSON PLANS FOR THE TEACHER. AMONG THE TENTATIVE CONCLUSIONS OF THE STUDY…

THE CLOZE PROCEDURE WAS USED TO INVESTIGATE THE PREDICTABILITY OF LANGUAGE MATERIALS AND TO EXAMINE THE RELATIONSHIP OF THE WRITTEN PRODUCTION OF LANGUAGE AND READING TO STRUCTURAL AND LEXICAL CONSTRUCTS. FIFTY-SIX SOPHOMORES RANDOMLY SELECTED FROM 152 STUDENTS ENROLLED IN INTRODUCTORY PSYCHOLOGY COURSES AT CAMPBELL COLLEGE WERE RANDOMLY ASSIGNED…

A study was conducted to examine children's use of social factors as bases for evaluating different patterns of code switching in dyadic social interaction. The factors were role-related and social norms, interpersonal accommodation, intergroup biases, and socio-cultural status. An initial study was conducted of monolingual and bilingual English…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 29 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) stop/fricative variation; (2) the acquisition of relational comparatives; (3) teachers' turn taking sanctions in primary school lessons; (4) hearing as an age…

This study on the African child had three objectives: (1) to become familiar with the environment of the African child, (2) to investigate the vocabulary to which the child is exposed at home and at school, and (3) to compare the vocabulary of the native language with that of the school. The first part of the study constituted a linguistic study…

The spontaneous speech of a Mohawk-speaking boy was recorded from age 2;10 to 4;1. Analysis of this speech indicated that certain verbal prefixes are acquired earlier than suffixes. The pronominal prefix of nouns, on the other hand, enters late. Yet, before the appearance of any nominal affix, the child already uses a pronominal possessive as a…

The purpose of this paper is to present systematically some facts regarding interdialectal constant and varying features of the semantics of English kinship terminology. The data present some problems for current views of grammar and of linguistic variation. Regarding the former, it is not clear what sort of "rule," what place in…

Paradoxically, linguists' speculations about sex differences in language use are highly plausible and yet have received little empirical support from well controlled studies. An experiment was designed to correct a flaw in earlier methodologies by sampling precisely the kinds of situations in which predicted differences (e.g., swearing,…

From about age four to age eleven, a child's concept of "word" develops from a lack of conceptual differentiation about things and events to an awareness of words as meaningful elements in themselves. Piaget's theory of cognitive development offers a perspective from which this phenomenon can be evaluated. The preoperational and concrete…

This paper presents the results of a quantitative analysis of the historical present tense (HP) in English. The tokens of HP in narrative clauses, such as "he's smiling, an' he picks up the card," are referentially equivalent to their past tense alternants in the phrases, "he was smiling an' he picked up the card." Previous…