In an attempt to demonstrate that the mismatch between the grammatical features of Black dialect and Standard English grammar used in children's reading materials is a source of reading interference, 67 second and third grade Black dialect speaking children each read orally a text written in Black dialect and a parallel text written in Standard…

Assuming that an infant's first stage of verbal communication is melodic and the result of controlling the motion of the vocal cords, a question arises concerning the second stage in development. Is it the shaping of the oral cavity of the direction of the articulators? The author's observation of an infant through his first year of development…

The purpose of this study was to locate those measurable criteria of responsiveness to language which have not been utilized to any significant extent in standardized tests. The project involved creating a testing instrument, reviewing of the instrument by a panel of experts, and applying the resultant test to a small population of college…

This study hypothesized that recent experience with a set of words is a strong influence on selecting words in an appropriate context where other lexical items are equally available for selection, i.e., recency training should significantly increase the probability of occurrence of words chosen to fill gaps in structured sentences. Two experiments…

This discussion considers the process of subject raising, which takes the constituent subject out of the complement clause and makes it a constituent of the matrix clause and the occurrence of this process in Japanese and in other subject-object-verb (SOV) languages. The first part of the paper demonstrates why subject raising is not a common…

The comprehensibility of materials compressed and then expanded by means of an electromechanical process was tested with 280 Army inductees divided into groups of high and low mental aptitude. Three short listening selections relating to military activities were subjected to compression and compression-expansion to produce seven versions. Data…

This general bibliography on discourse and related topics lists over 350 books, articles, and papers, written between 1912 and 1971, covering a great variety of linguistic problems and issues. The subjects range from general topics such as "Nouns and Noun Phrases" and "Language as Symbolization" to such specialized articles as "Samoan…

In this study, the author seeks to demonstrate that Swedish is unique in its avoidance of the pronouns of address, extreme in its use of impersonal questions and circumscriptions, and that such language usage is directly related to the perceived relationship of social status, as explicitly and implicitly expressed by informants. The author also…

One of the several causal mechanisms for errors made by adult second language learners is interference from the native language. This paper attempts to account for the cognitive nature of interference by proposing two psycholinguistically based principles that will explain various types of production and perception errors made of second language…

Factor analysis accounts for most of the variance in adult ratings of concepts with adjectives. Affective reactions are present in young infants, but still to be explored is how the stable adult factor structure develops from these reactions. Three questions are investigated in this study: (1) is this factor structure present in 3- and…

This volume is devoted to phonetics and phonology. It consists of the following papers: (1) "Generative Phonology, Dependency Phonology and Southern French," by J. Durand, which discusses aspects of a regional pronunciation of French, the status of syllables in generative phonology, and concepts of dependency phonology; (2) "On the…

It is well known to anyone involved in teaching English to Finnish students that it is difficult for Finns to distinguish between English /ptk/ and /bdg/. This second volume in a series on a Finnish-English contrastive project reports on a study which attempted to obtain more concrete knowledge about the ability of speakers of Finnish to use the…

In this paper early and later development of knowledge of syntactic structures and this development in language-disordered children are reviewed. Theories that have been presented to account for syntactic development (cognitive, cognitive-semantic and social-environmental) are discussed. Early developmental data indicate that there is not a…

Examines the role of "routines" and grammatical patterns in first and second language acquisition by children and adults, specifically with regard to syntactic structures. (Author/AM)

This paper first explores the treatment of women in materials in current use for English as a second language (ESL) and then discusses English words labelled as prejudicial against women (e.g., generic "he"). Changes are suggested for reducing the bias in the portrayal of women in ESL materials. (CFM)