Children's early utterances were studied to determine whether there are developmental changes in the content, context, frequency, and form of their speech and the degree to which the changes correspond to changes in Piagetian cognitive stage. Twenty children were studied; six were 10 or 11 months old, and the remaining 14 were distributed evenly…

Fifty residents of Houston, Texas, were surveyed to determine whether or not factors concerning their background affected their word choice, grammatical usage, and pronunciation. Each informant answered a questionnaire consisting of one page of background data and two pages of questions about his daily speech. In correlating the participants'…

Foreigner talk is the register used by native speakers to make themselves understood by foreigners whose competence in the language is limited. Published studies on foreigner talk have dealt with phonetic variation sparingly and impressionistically. This may be due to the difficulty of imposing experimental constraints on natural linguistic events…

A synchronic structural description is presented of Haitian Creole as spoken in the Port-au-Prince-Jacmel area, concentrating mainly on phonoloqy and morphology. Historical information and commentary are presented on diglossia and illiteracy, two intertwining sociolinguistic problems of Haiti. A detailed analysis is presented of the Creole sound…

Second language reading research based on a psycholinguistic approach was undertaken. A model of the language user derived from the literature on first language acquisition was used. The role of conceptualization on second language reading, including the effects of interference and other factors in the first language, is discussed, and…

A project designed to gather information about similarities and differences that may be important for teaching English to Finnish learners, and, to a certain extent, for teaching Finnish through English, was conducted through a systematic comparison of the two languages and an analysis of instances where the two languages come into contact. In the…

Parallels between processes in society and in language are drawn in this analysis of problems involved in eliminating sexism in language. The paper is organized as follows: varieties of sexism in language are outlined; the linguistic notion of marking is applied to the sexist structures; psychological aspects of such marking are considered;…

The structure of the Noun Phrase (NP) is analyzed in a corpus featuring Tagalog-English code-switching. Instances of first language (L1) NP's appearing as subjects and complements in second language (L2) sentential units are examined to gain insight into code-switching. Ten thirty-minute tapes of a radio program in Tagalog provided the corpus for…

To assist language researchers in their analysis of interlanguage, some values for the linguistic variables of Source Language (SL), Interlanguage (IL), and Target Language (TL) are set forth. Although the fundamental assumption underlying interlanguage research is that interlanguages are linguistic systems, it is difficult to describe the…

A study was undertaken to investigate the nature of the cohesive features found in the language of selected first grade students and to study and compare the cohesive features of language samples in the beginning level of three widely used reading series to those found in the language of the children for whom they are intended. In the first part…

Two tests were administered to 87 students at the third through fifth levels of English as a second language (with emphasis on scientific education) at the Center for the Teaching of Foreign Languages of the Autonomous Metropolitan University. Test I consisted of 25 multiple choice and true/false reading comprehension questions based on a…

Literature on the sighted child suggests that blind children might be delayed in language acquisition and/or restricted in the semantic content of their utterances and in the communicative intentions they express. This study questions the use of guidelines appropriate for monitoring sighted children in the study of language development in blind…

An investigation was conducted of socioeconomic differences in the cognitive style and content of mother/child interaction, through the use of a task in which mothers attempted to get their children to point to the target item in an array of four pictures. Subjects were 32 mother/child dyads, half black and half white. Within each ethnic group,…

TO DETERMINE WHETHER AURAL-VISUAL LEARNING OF VOCABULARY IN CONTEXT IS MORE EFFECTIVE THAN ONLY VISUAL LEARNING, AND TO CONTRIBUTE STATISTICAL BASIS TO THE ASSUMPTION THAT AURAL FAMILIARITY WITH THE LANGUAGE FACILITATES MORE EFFICIENT LEARNING AND RETENTION OF VOCABULARY, A PROJECT WAS UNDERTAKEN AT EARLHAM COLLEGE THAT INVOLVED TWO GROUPS OF…

THIS REPORT DESCRIBES IN DETAIL FIVE RELATED EXPERIMENTS THAT WERE CONDUCTED IN AREAS PERTAINING TO THE TEACHING OF FRENCH PRONUNCIATION TO NATIVE SPEAKERS OF AMERICAN ENGLISH. THE FIRST TWO EXPERIMENTS SOUGHT TO DETERMINE THE RELATIVE ACCEPTABILITY OF 38 ENGLISH PHONEMES TO NATIVE FRENCH LISTENERS AT EACH OF TWO ACCEPTABILITY LEVELS--PHONEMIC AND…