This word frequency list was extracted from a corpus of fifty half-hour conversations recorded in Paris during the academic year 1967-68. The speakers, who did not know that they were being recorded, were all well-educated professionals and all speakers of the most standard dialect of French. The list is made up of all phonetically discrete words…

Since pronunciations of vowel clusters are among the most unpredictable letter-sound correspondences in English and therefore children learning to read must often rely on something other than spelling as a clue to pronunciation of vowel cluster words, data relating to pronunciation frequencies of certain vowel clusters were gathered for this…

The relationships between Southern Negro dialect exposure, age, reading ability, and auditory discrimination were studied. The subjects were 112 students randomly selected from grades 2 and 4 from two elementary schools in Richmond and Martinez, California. The predominant speech pattern at one school was Southern Negro dialect; at the other…

A model for transforming data from verbal learning experiments into tables useful to an educational technician was developed, based on a similar one for scientific agriculture. The necessary data were obtained through two experiments replicated upon relevant populations. In the first study, a series of free-recall experiments were performed using…

A set of procedures for testing hypotheses about the syntactic structure of natural languages has been developed for use on-line with computer display consoles. The procedures were designed in the context of Chomsky's transformational generative grammar. A linguist can construct phrase structure trees, selecting with the lightgun from alternative…

Three major areas of needed research in language and reading development for children of Spanish-speaking backgrounds are presented in a general overview. The first area of need is that of normative and descriptive studies of prelearning processes. This includes analyses of language base and home language behavior and is aimed at a more precise…

The essential goal of the Maclay On-Site Training Project is "to develop a method for training teachers who will be effective with the educationally disadvantaged." Although this final report summarizes the objectives and design of the overall project and its five components, its emphasis is on research developments related to ways of evaluating…

This paper describes a project concerned with the understanding of natural language by computers. The project involves the development of both a theoretical model of natural language processing by computer and an actual implementation of the theory. The specific implementation chosen is a question-answering system for elementary mathematics which…

This study describes the segmental phonemes of five 4-year-old speakers of Black English, and analyzes both their language development and ethnic characteristics. The study group of Negro children, born and living in Washington, D.C., came from homes that met two of three specified criteria based on the mother's education and family income. The…

With this issue, the Center for Applied Linguistics takes over the preparation, publishing, and mailing of this newsletter. A report is given on the first year's activities of the Alaska Native Language Center of the University of Alaska, which is involved in developing and disseminating literacy materials and native literature, designing…

This study was designed to collect and analyze the verbal protocols of students involved in introspection as they responded to standardized measures of reading comprehension, for the purpose of learning more about the reading process. Eleven seventh grade students from an urban public school were randomly chosen from 61 subjects who met the…

Recently much linguistic research has been amassed on black language. With rare exceptions, this linguistic research has been directed to the lower working-class members of the black community. The language of blacks who are not lower class, on the other hand, has been summarily ignored, resulting in the middle-class black protest against the…

Thirteen Mexican-American children in Corpus Christi, Texas, most approximately six years old, were interviewed in Spanish for the purpose of establishing the phonology of their dialect. The linguistic competence of the children, not their performance, was of primary interest. A phonological chart was devised based on the data derived from the…

The purposes of this study were to investigate the relation between knowledge of formatives and knowledge of formative derivatives and the relation between knowledge of nonformatives and knowledge of nonformative derivatives, and to determine if the first relation is greater than the second. The subjects were 178 college freshmen who were enrolled…

The quality of mother-child linguistic interaction was studied in 40 6-year-old English children and their mothers. Both the middle and working classes were represented in the sample. Tasks were administered in which children were to ask questions of their mothers. Questions were analyzed in terms of open versus closed. The majority of the…