Reviews four current approaches to play behavior of young children and concludes that using forms of play such as puppets and body action movements to rehearse story content is effective in aiding aural language comprehension and recall in young children. (FL)

Reports that praise and extrinsic reinforcers, such as candy, increased the rate of letter recognition in preschool children and that the increase was partially maintained when the reinforcement was removed. (FL)

A study of the language usage of 80 middle school students revealed no significant difference between the sexes on any measure of syntactic maturity; however, boys deviated from standard usage somewhat more frequently than did girls, and boys produced more words in oral language while girls produced more words in written language. (ET)

Reviews research on prosody and segmental perception, segmentation and invariance, categorical perception of speech and nonspeech, feature detectors, scaling speech sounds to an auditory-articulatory space, acoustic-phonetic dependencies within the syllable, higher order (nonphonetic) factors in the comprehension of fluent speech, and cerebral…

Discusses the speech act approach and its usefulness in conveying the meaning of the imperative both for the native speaker and for the purpose of language acquisition. Analyses the infinitival construction of German-language advertising slogans and describes its potential for conveying a variety of messages. (Author/MES)

Two studies elicited native speaker and nonnative speaker judgments regarding preferred word order of the idioms known as "freezes." The results support the notion that rules of frozen word order are psychologically real and reflect universal language rules. (Author/AM)

Evidence is provided to refute the suggestion, made by Macnamara et al. (1976), that four-year-old children perform logical operations corresponding to formal logic upon the sentential components of implicative verbs to produce indirect implications. It is argued that children use past knowledge plus additional premises to derive indirect…

Presents a rebuttal to Hidi and Hildyard's (1976) criticism of Macnamara et al.'s (1976) assertion regarding the ability of four-year-old children to grasp implicatives and presuppositions. (AM)

Examines the relationship between phonetic substitution patterns in child speech and sound change patterns in dialects of adult language, basing an explanation of these phenomena on acoustic data and language universals. (AM)

Discusses hybrid verbs as a linguistic product of the anglophone cultural influence on the Spanish spoken by Cubans in southeastern Florida. (NCR)

Based on experimental research, examines the relationship between American Sign Language and French Sign Language, and sociolinguistic variation in both sign languages. (AM)

This article reports on a study designed to obtain data on the first words understood and produced by eight infants. It provides a descriptive account of the earliest levels of language comprehension and allows comparison of lexical development in comprehension and production. (Author/CFM)

Phenomena are examined to support the conception that cognitive structures continue to reflect the numerous ways of apprehending the world that blend to some degree into each other. (AMH)

Traces the development of an approach to studying face-to-face interaction that proposes to expound the rules or procedures of interaction and to account for observed behavior in terms of how it functions as a communicational system. A selective literature review and recommendations for further study are included. (EJS)

Describes an experiment comparing the monolingual and bilingual approaches to foreign language teaching. Two 6th grade classes in English were taught for nine class periods, one by the monolingual and one by the bilingual method. A slight advantage in favor of the monolingual method is reported. (IFS/WGA)