Investigates the development and production of spatial deictic terms ("this/that", "here/there", "my/your") in the context of a hide-and-seek game using preschool children and college age adults. (Author/ED)

Examines the relationship between language acquisition and current linguistic theory, with specific reference to Chomsky's work. Linguistic areas that should be explored in relation to acquisition are suggested, including regional dialect studies, the place of sociolinguistic factors in acquisition, and syntax. Suggestions as to how to analyze…

The concepts of distance, modalization, comprehensibility, and tension, as used for discourse analysis, can be applied to the analysis of speech events in literary texts. Such a linguistic approach may lead to new insights for the psychological description of authors and/or literary characters. Available from Dept. of English, University of…

An investigation of children's ability to convey and respond to requests for action was based on the spontaneous speech of 36 dyads of nursery school children (3;6--5;7). Examinations of the contexts of direct requests indicated that speaker and addressee shared an understanding of the interpersonal meaning factors relevant to requesting.…

A study of one speaker's intuitions about and performance in Black English is presented with relation to Saussure's "langue-parole" dichotomy. Native speakers of a language have intuitions about the static synchronic entities although the data of their speaking is variable and panchronic. These entities are in a diglossic relationship to each…

Using a rhetorical approach to communication and communicative competence that defines communication as an interactive process in which people participate to achieve their goals, a study was undertaken to determine whether the communication skills postulated from the rhetorical definition could be judged independently from the linguistic skills of…

Two examples of linguistic blindness (the inability of the native teacher/speaker to assess objectively certain features of the language) in the Hindi language are chosen for discussion. Problems in the accurate description of nominal and pronominal declension are dealt with. A study of post-positions is also included, since the declension system…

This study compared the speech of fathers and mothers to young children in the age ranges of 19-29-months and 32-43-months. Audio tape recordings were made of the verbal interactions of 20 father-daughter dyads and 20 mother-daughter dyads while engaged in free play in the family home. Using verbatim transcripts of the sessions, the degree of…

Preschoolers' ability to utilize language in spatial problem solving was tested with 64 predominately middle-class children. The number of correct responses was analyzed using an age/sex/medium analysis of variance. It was found that the verbal response mode leads to substantially more correct responses than do pictures and that girls performed…

A group of three-year-old children was compared to one of four-year-old children in the usage of 26 syntactic transformations on the basis of 60 utterances per child. The older group used significantly more sentence transformations per child and significantly fewer simple active declarative sentences than the younger. Among the older group 10 out…

This paper is part of a current dissertation project exploring the relationships between constructs in linguistic theory and pattern of language behavior in aphasic adults. The author feels that linguists have done little enough work in the area of speech pathology yet they have discussed at length the distinction between competence and…

"Communication competence" refers to the knowledge an individual has about the use of language in communication. As a concept and theory, however, it needs to be further elaborated and clarified. In particular, four issues must be resolved before communication competence theory can achieve full development and exert impact in the classroom. The…

This theoretical paper reevaluates the Piagetian tradition in the study of propositional reasoning. Piaget's assertion that children's logic, prior to the stage of formal operations, is structurally adequate for dealing with objects and their properties, but is inadequate for fully competent propositional reasoning, is challenged on three grounds:…

This study was designed to assess the intercorrelations of selected variables of reading readiness to determine which measures were related. It was hypothesized that there are no underlying language factors which can be identified within a selected group of assessments, and that neither the original variables nor any factors, if found, predict the…