A modified cloze procedure was used in two studies designed to gain insight into the silent reading process. In the first, involving a small group of third- and fourth-grade children, several stories were prepared based on the assumption that the cloze procedure might be manipulated to reveal a reader's use of semantic, syntactic, and graphophonic…

Linear syllogisms present two premises, each describing a relation between two terms. The individual's task is to infer the relation among the three terms of the linear syllogism, and then answer a question about one or more of these relations. For example, "John is taller than Bob. Sam is shorter than Bob. Who is the tallest?" Students…

A total of 78 Mexican-American and 14 Anglo-American children participated in a study to determine the relationship of oral English proficiency, social acceptance, and academic achievement among fifth grade students. The students were administered measures of phonology and verbal expression. Scores from a standardized achievement test were used to…

Data from eleven different languages were collected to study the uses of deictic verbs of motion in order to discover possible universals for the semantics of such verbs. The languages, many of them unrelated or distantly related, are: Croatian, English, German, Indonesian, Japanese, Mandarin, Nepali, Spanish, Tamil, Thai, and Turkish. Native…

A study was conducted to test whether three, four, and five-year-old children would be better able to use either static or dynamic properties for grouping objects, and whether performance under these conditions would be better than when no property was given. One of the two study tasks, the free sort, also used by Rosch et al. (1976), asked…

This paper defines contrastive phonetics and discusses phonetic work in the Jyvaskyla Contrastive Project, the background theory of contrastive analysis, and expansion of the framework of contrastive phonetics. Contrastive phonetics is defined as a method which is used to compare the similarities and differences in the chain of speech…

Sex-related language stereotypes and sex-related differences in language usage are examined in this paper, and some recent research findings that illuminate them are reported. The following topics are among those discussed: seemingly universal characterizations of women's speech as gossip, nagging, or chatting, partially explained by most…

Observation and interviews of the children in two third grade classrooms--one in which children write frequently and learn punctuation skills in context, and one in which children learn punctuation in isolation--suggest that punctuation skills are learned more effectively in context. In interviews the "writers" could explain an average of 8.66…

The research reported here focuses on one aspect of the communicative environment, namely vocabulary. The central question motivating this research was whether there are social class and ethnic group differences in the vocabulary used in the home and in the school situation. A corpus of talk was searched for the use of words from four standardized…

The middle childhood years are a period of refinement of the semantics and syntax acquired in the early years, of substantial metalinguistic development, and of subtle changes in actual processing strategies. In a study undertaken to determine how these three factors interact, children aged 6 to 11 were asked to produce and recognize paraphrases.…

Production data from a longitudinal study of seven children in their first attempts to produce words containing fricatives are presented to illustrate how children use four distinct strategies to approach this relatively difficult class of sounds. The strategies are: (1) favorite sounds--an approach used by a subject who seemed to enjoy playing…

Progress that has been made in second language research in the last two years and future directions in the research methodology of second language studies are discussed. In order to examine the continuation and expansion of current research, the research reported by Schumann (1976) is compared with current research as represented by the titles of…

Data delimited by the phonology-to-semantics framework of mainstream linguistics are inadequate to account for the subtle influences of first language (L1) upon second language (L2). Unique errors for which there is no L1 correlate are found in samples of written English produced by Japanese and Chinese second language learners. This is due to a…

The semantic change which has occurred in an Austrian community over the past seventy-five years is examined. The study is based on a comparison of an 1897 word list, sound inventory, and phonograph recording with 1973 recordings of sixty informants from four age groups and five socioeconomic strata. In Inmst, the development from an…

The function of speech and its implications for studying, understanding, and promoting language development are explored in this paper. Function is considered to be the purpose of the speaker when speaking, variously termed context of situation, situation, context, circumstance, or mode. It is noted that very few studies of speech and speech…