In "The Sound Pattern of English," Chomsky and Halle maintain that the phonetic representation of most words can be generated from underlying forms and a small set of rules. Since these underlying forms are frequently close to the traditional spelling, we may hypothesize that literate native speakers share comparable internalized rules which…

A set of levels of useful oral competence in a second language are proposed, and a revision in its structure is shown that can make it applicable to first language and to passive-bilingual situations. Unlike many other scales of bilingualism, it integrates oral expression and oral comprehension into a single scale without losing validity. Its…

The entries in this annotated bibliography are divided into four major sections. The first includes some of the arguments pro and con on the cloze procedure and a few research studies along with some articles that give "how-to" recommendations. The second major section includes five subsections: the first deals with basic research concerning the…

This is a discussion of another phase of bilingualism--structural difficulties in the target language of the student which impede his second language acquisition. The paper focuses on errors in learning English which do not derive from transfers from another language, and which cannot be predicted from contrastive analysis. These are intralingual…

Certain teaching performances needed to elicit and reinforce specific linguistic performances from the students fall under the categories of speaking a variety of standard English, reading, spelling, vocabulary, and grammatical structures and writing. As a model of linguistic usage, the teacher must speak a standard variety of English, build on…

This paper is supportive to the anthropological principle of biculturation as a pragmatic principle of education of America's contemporary ethnically-different people. The acquisition of bilingualism and a bicultural ethos are objective evidences of this process in action. Personal experiences of the author's childhood education in a Greek and…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the Language Communication Skills Task (LCST), a technique developed to study the characteristics of effective language communication behavior of young children. The 112 subjects included in the study were randomly selected from three grade levels in an inner-city public elementary school located in…

This paper concerns which aspects of speech articulation belong to phonology and which aspects belong to phonetics. The authors deal primarily with physiological criteria, and consider examples of assimilation and its phonological or phonetic relevance. Co-articulation and reduction are also considered; they are viewed as factors responsible for…

Bilingualism and the cultural and linguistic pluralism that it involves should be preserved and encouraged within the national educational system. Statistics concerning bilinguals on a national scale would present a more accurate picture if based on John Macnamara's definition of bilinguals as "persons who possess at least one of the language…

The purpose of this research was to begin to refute the deficit approach to the verbal abilities of poor children. The contention was that data collected on poor children's verbal abilities had been done in incorrect social situations. Prior research had indicated that language development is innate and that disadvantaged children will be…

If the question of what it is that is innate is simply left as some kind of human learning potential, this position, representative of the nativist philosophy, does not differ radically from that of behaviorists. The latter position holds that a human being starts out with a mind which is basically empty and receptive to, subject to, and the…

The test performance of 120 Anglo, black, and Chicano third- and fifth-grade children is used to demonstrate the similarities between the processes of diachronic and ontogenetic language change. The instrument used measured the range of knowledge of several grammatical structures. Analysis and interpretation of results suggested the gradual…

Describes specific changes in children's conversational abilities in early childhood, which may in turn serve to alter how their partners judge their abilities to understand. The evidence regarding the level and types of changes in adult speech to children as the child's ability changes is also addressed. (EJS)

Rebuts an article that claimed to overthrow the authors' 1969 findings. It is demonstrated that the original study concerned syntactic organization and that interpretation of it as bearing on comprehension is largely unjustified. Comments on their prior work in light of new developments in child language are included. (EJS)

Samples of the communicative behavior of a group of mildly mentally retarded adults were examined for indications of mature linguistic competence (specifically, grammatical morpheme and complex sentence use).Findings confirmed the expectation that the eventual mastery of these aspects of linguistic competence in higher-level retarded individuals…