A telephone conversation was transcribed and marked for stress. A portion of the transcription, not marked for stress, was given to native English speakers who were asked to underline the word(s) in each sentence or phrase that should receive the most prominent stress. The overlap of actual stress and the assignments of the participants who were…

The discussion throughout this paper is devoted to answering the question: What is the nature of our knowledge of language and what theoretical assumptions does the answer entail for linguistic description? Discussed are--(1) what it means to know a language, (2) the distinction between linguistic competence and performance, (3) justification of…

Selected aspects of early phonological development are described, and eight important characteristics are suggested. It is held that the child plays a highly active, creative role in the acquisition process. The child's early vocables constitute a connecting link between babbling and adult-modeled speech; the child's phonological systems for…

This study attempted to assess the linguistic competence of black lower-class speakers within each of two language systems: standard English and Black English. The subjects were 72 black kindergarten, third-, and sixth-graders in a predominantly black community in Toledo, Ohio. All children attending the school were considered lower-class, since…

A native speaker of a language possesses both grammatical and rhetorical competence. A grammatical model, in its deep structure, represents an "is a" relationship. It seeks to offer some explanation of a human being as a human being. A rhetorical model represents a "counts as" relationship. It seeks to offer some explanation of…

This study was designed to explore the influences of visual context upon sentence comprehension in young children. Three-, four-, five-, and six-year-old children were presented with various linguistic tasks under varied visual context constraints. Four context conditions--no visual context, a helpful pictured context, a helpful visual context…

In this paper the author reviews and synthesizes the research literature concerning the developmental relationships between conservation of number and linguistic capability in handling of quantitative and relational terms. Several models for the development of these competencies are discussed. On the basis of this review the author concludes that…

The possible relevance linguistics could have for curriculum development in native language teaching is explored. The discussion focuses on three question: (1) Does the study of linguistic theory in school contribute to the development of the students' language competence? (2) Is the study of language a subject worth teaching? (3) Can linguistic…

A study was undertaken to determine how much knowledge children have of grammatical systems before they evidence the systems in their spontaneous speech in a productive way. A child aged about two and a half years was examined over several months through elicited imitation causing him to repeat a model sentence immediately after the researcher.…

This paper reports on a study conducted to determine the abilities of children to make optional transformations in sentences conjoined with "and." The subjects were 35 middle-class children between the ages of five and eight, who demonstrated average school achievement, spoke standard American English, and had normal speech and hearing. A…

This bulletin is the first of three designed to give detailed help on fostering language competence in 4- to 6-year-old school children. The bulletin introduces the teacher to a group of prepositions and conjunctions (chosen from the Dolch Basic Sight Vocabulary List of 220 Words) which are important to the meaning of sentences. The list was…

An investigation of the relationships between form and comprehension of written materials by eleventh grade students is reported in this paper. Students were asked to manipulate two variables of spacing and punctuation in a consistently administered and marked exercise. Students also completed a comprehension test on the exercise they had just…

Morphological features in the speech of Southern white and Negro students at four grade levels were studied by an instrument designed to test the students' knowledge of fifteen inflectional endings (including the allomorphs of the regular plural, singular possessive and third person singular present, absence of the plural possessive, and the…

Discussed in this paper are reasons why people who speak second languages may not speak or write them with native-speaker-like fluency. These second-language deficiencies may be the results of (1) interference, the use of aspects of another language at a variety of levels; (2) strategies of learning such as over overgeneralization and analogy by…

This paper considers the existing evidence of systems of co-occurring, sex-linked, linguistic signals in the United States. In the first section, the type of research which has been done in linguistic sex contrasts and then the relevant material in "folk linguistics" are discussed. In addition, a number of studies about the differences among men…