This book consists of five lectures on communication given at the fifth Nobel Conference. Leroy G. Augenstein explores the positive and negative consequences of man's increasing capacity to manipulate and control the human mind. Peter Marler demonstrates that all the elements necessary for a communication system to qualify as a language exist…

A set of procedures for testing hypotheses about the syntactic structure of natural languages has been developed for use on-line with computer display consoles. The procedures were designed in the context of Chomsky's transformational generative grammar. A linguist can construct phrase structure trees, selecting with the lightgun from alternative…

This verbal memory study considers only simple sentences and examines learner performance under the two conditions of audio presentation and printed presentation. Learner performance is compared when required either to recognize sentences identical to those in the original list or, alternatively, to recognize non-identical sentences incorporating…

In the last decade an unprecedented number of college-level foreign students have appeared in the United States, competing with native speakers in schools where the only medium of instruction is English. All students at American universities have to do three kinds of sophisticated writing--summarizing in notes, writing exam essays, and writing…

This paper deals with three problems encountered in the areal study of "colonial" and "immigrant" languages (used in Haugen's sense) and examines how data presented in tabular or map form can assist in their solution. They are: (1) the mechanisms by which the speakers of various dialects of a single language--dialects which…

This paper is essentially a critical survey of different theoretical approaches to child language in general and to child phonology in particular. The author states her own conviction that language acquisition is different from language retention, that language acquisition is a non-unique process consisting of a multiplicity of devices, that…

This essay discusses a theory of grammar which incorporated Chomsky's distinction between deep and surface structure and accepts Fillmore's proposal to exclude such subject and concepts as direct object from the base structure. While recognizing the need for specifying an underlying set of caselike relations, it is proposed that this need can best…

Designed to test the effect upon comprehension of repatterning passages from a tenth grade social studies text by approximating the syntactic patterns found in a transformational analysis of the writing of the tenth grade subjects expected to read the text, this instrument was applied to 34 subjects who were asked to write 1,000 words of prose…

Compositions written by 66 second grade boys and girls in one control and two experimental groups were analyzed to study the effect of 21 instructional sessions in sentence expansion and to determine which of the instructional methods employed was most beneficial to a particular sex group. Lesson plans for the control group were parallel to two…

This paper argues that Chomsky's and Halle's restriction on the features [+high, +low] are too severe; that this restriction is inconsistent with the generative treatment of affricates, laterally-released stops, and prenasalized stops; and that the restriction is inconsistent with the notion that linguistic descriptions are abstract theories about…

A computer-assisted instruction system, called IT1 (Interpretive Tutor), is described which is intended to assist a student's efforts to learn the content of textual material and to evaluate his efforts toward that goal. The text is represented internally in the form of semantic networks with auxiliary structures which relate network nodes to…

The process of explanation as defined by the covering law model of science contains stringent criteria which often cannot be met by communication scientists. An alternative model, less powerful but more obtainable--the system paradigm--should be adopted. Four types of explanation provide a context for a discussion of the system paradigm…

This paper presents a linguistic discussion of play-languages--designated as ludlings by the author and tentatively defined as the result of a transformation or a series of transformations acting regularly on an ordinary language text, with the intent of altering the form, but not the content of the original message, for purposes of concealment or…

This discussion of universe-scope relations in Chinese and Japanese provides a contrastive analysis of certain features in the two languages. A striking similarity in the deep structure of the noun phrase in both languages is noted and discussed in detail. Both languages have two constituents in a noun phrase which have a semantic relationship…

Sentence combining practices works best as a skill-building adjunct to regular composition work. (JH)