This is a research report on the acquisition and development of language in children from 4 to 6 years as observed in the pre-elementary grades. The research was done by a number of teams scattered throughout France, and this book is a collection of the papers prepared as a result of their research. The report is divided into five sections. The…

This paper describes and gives the results of a psycholinguistic experiment investigating the impact of certain surface syntactic structures on the perception and memory of language. The basic assumption is that the content of an utterance must be its most salient aspect in memory. The for of an utterance, its surface grammar and phonology, must…

The paper investigates the problems of assembling, describing and computerizing corpora, defined as collections of "texts assumed to be representative of a given language, dialect or other subject of a language, to be used for linguistic analysis." Specific reference is made to the formation of the Brown Standard Corpus. The formation of…

This paper discusses interrogative structures, based on the results and conclusions derived from comparing the interrogative systems of 79 randomly selected languages. The paper begins by listing a number of generalizations about interrogative structures based on disparate observations in the field. These generalizations constitute the basis for…

This study is concerned with the description of compound sentences, relative clauses, and complement clauses in Standard Persian within a generative-transformational grammar. Compound sentences are divided into conjunctive, disjunctive, and adversative types on the basis of the semantic relations they express. A conjunctive clause is either…

This paper defines the grammatical role of a particle in Swahili in terms of the semantic information which it contributes to all utterances in which it occurs. The particle -A occurs in the syntactic configuration Noun 1 -A Noun 2 and has been traditionally described as reflecting relations of possession and attribution between the two nouns in…

"Done" occurs outside of the participle paradigm in several varieties of English particularly those associated currently or historically with the South. This feature is also found in Appalachian English. Grammatical classifications have been proposed, including that of quasi-modal, pre-verbal form, and adverb. None of the labelling…

The need for an objective index of language development has long been recognized, and various means of measuring language growth have been proposed. This study compares two of the indexes that have recently been devised for measuring language growth. Its specific purposes are (1) to examine the correlation between mean T-unit length and syntactic…

The purpose of this project was to make a preliminary investigation of the processes of second language acquisition by children, adolescents and adults, and to develop a methodology appropriate to the study of second language learning. In the development of the methodology, applicable techniques from first language acquisition research were…

This annotated bibliography on child bilingualism and second language acquisition contains 1,661 references. Preceding the bibliographic entries are a list of the major conceptual fields covered by the bibliography, a subject index and an index of languages, countries and peoples dealt with in the bibliography. The indices refer to the entries in…

The Thai Discourse Analysis Project seeks to provide a description of linguistic structures of importance in understanding the nature of Thai speech. Previous studies have been limited, and restricted to consideration of the written language and "literary" speech. The project consists of three phases: the acquisition of recorded texts,…

The purpose of this study was to compare the responses of students to three techniques of teaching literature: silent reading, solo performance, and readers theatre. Three hundred seventy-one students in three classes each in ninth and eleventh grades in three high schools in the north Texas area received three presentations of three short…

The academic and administrative problems involved in the quest to integrate the language sciences are reviewed. It is claimed that the explanatory power of a truly interdisciplinary approach to language can only be achieved on a meta-paradigmatic level. This failure to consider the disparities in theoretical persuasions, it is noted, is a major…

This study is an attempt to explore systematically language attitudes among the younger and more socially mobile Mexican Americans, to determine what linguistic and demographic variables are correlated with differential language attitudes, and to ascertain to what extent, if any, attitudinal commitment to Spanish correlates with behavioral…

Writing samples representing argumentation, exposition, narration, and description were gathered from 52 fourth-grade pupils. Significant differences were found among the four modes of writing and among high, medium, and low ability groups, for T-unit length and clauses per T-unit; lesser differences also were found for clause length.…