A paper by Keenan and Klein (1975) provided evidence for the hypothesis that conversationality is present in children as young as 2 and 1/2 years of age. Results of the study indicated that before the emergence of more adult-like coherency operations, the children passed through a period in which such operations were foreshadowed by vocal play.…

The purpose of this study was to describe the pronunication of American college students learning French. To gather the data a set of 21 sounds, all theoretically in contrast with English sounds, was chosen. These were elicited in a series of sessions during the subjects' first semester of French. The subjects recorded their pronunciation on…

This paper stresses the unified nature of the Languages for Special Purposes (LSP) operation, and argues for increased research at every phase. It deals specifically with the following topics: (1) a procedural ESP model in which the ESP activity is conceived of as a whole, and the various stages in the planning and mounting of an ESP program are…

A study is reported whose purpose was to investigate if a relationship existed between Spanish and English language development in young Spanish speaking Mexican-Americans. One half of the children involved in the study were in maintenance bilingual-bicultural programs. The other half were in pull-out ESL programs. Using the descriptive survey…

The word frequency lists presented in this publication were compiled to create a database for further research into vocabulary use, especially the variation in vocabulary due to differences in situation and social group membership. Taken from the natural conversations of 40 target children (four and a half to five years old) with their families,…

The acquisition of the copula and auxiliary "be" forms of "am,""is," and "are" was studied with 16 children. Spontaneous social speech samples were obtained from each child. One child's speech was sampled for approximately one hour per week from age 2;5 through 4;0, and for one-half hour per week from age 4;1 to 5;0. A second child's speech was…

The ontogenetic development of human vocal utterances and their role in early interaction processes were studied with a three-month-old baby. Recordings were made of infant vocalizations in the home and the sounds were classified. During a five-minute segment between the mother and infant, the infant produced 59 utterances, 93 percent of which had…

Noting that while laboratory investigations of recordings of children's spontaneous verbal creations or repetitions of traditional forms in their natural play habitats have indicated that they do engage in systematic explorations of language structures in their play, this paper points out that there have been no investigations of whether such…

The achievement of bilingualism appears to have positive consequences for the bilingual child, enhancing universal aspects of cognitive functioning available to all normal children. However, little is yet known about the interaction between educational treatment and the input factors the bilingual child brings to the situation. Focusing on the…

Minorities have for some time faced underrepresentation in the technical professions. However, recent statistics indicate that many more minorities are enrolled in higher education than ever before. This report centers on identifying the particular difficulties that bilingual Hispanic students majoring in technical subjects have in performing…

A study was conducted (1) to examine the development of comprehension and production in written language of two aspects of linguistic knowledge, knowledge of ambiguity and paraphrase; and (2) to examine the influences of reading ability as measured by currently used standardized reading tests and of sex on the development of this knowledge of…

This paper considers a distinction frequently used in sociolinguistics and ethnography of speaking to describe speech events: their formality or informality. Three principle meanings of "formality" found in the literature concern whether the formality relates to properties of a communicative code, properties of the social setting in…

Thirty-eight bidialectical rural Hawaiian children participated in a study to determine if they would display clustering in a cued recall task and to explore the possible influence of dialect usage on recall performance. For purposes of the study, "clustering" was defined as the ability of subjects to recall list items by category…

Research on the effects of two modes of sentence combining instruction on writing skills was conducted from 22 September through 17 December 1976, at Evans School in Tempe, Arizona. Subjects were 40 students in two fifth grade classes designated the individualized class and the group class. The individualized class followed a sentence combining…

A study was conducted to determine whether children give evidence of using any of six comprehension strategies and whether children of same and different ages use different strategies. It was studied how comprehension performance can best be predicted by other facts about the child, including his language and his language input. The six…