The express purpose of this presentation is with education and the technology of training strategies which relate to the conditions under which any two language systems are to be learned. It is assumed that Black English is structurally different from Standard English. It is concluded here that although the burden upon bilingual children is heavy,…

In behavioral science research, language has been increasingly seen to reflect the concepts that the child has acquired prior to, and hence independent of, the acquisition of language. Analyses based on this idea are confined largely to words that denote clear perceptual referents. Language, however, contains many terms that have no portrayable…

For years language teachers have conducted error analysis for remedial purposes. More recently error analysis has assumed a developmental purpose, namely as a clue to the process of acquiring a second language. Causes of learner errors, such as interference from the first language, confusing aspects of the second language, or learners fostering…

This research explored the fundamental processes involved in comprehending linguistic material: the duration of the process, the sequence of processes, and the sources of errors. One project examined the comprehension of affirmative and negative sentences that are read and verified with respect to a picture. A model developed to account for the…

A case study approach is used to investigate written linguistic performance among black college freshmen from lower socio-economic and black nonstandard English (BNE) speaking backgrounds who are assigned to remedial-type English skills courses and generally assumed by their teachers and others to lack either or both competence or performance…

Three objectives of research reported here were to describe the neural organization underlying language usage and language loss, to study activities occurring in both cerebral hemispheres, and to study neural changes related to changes in syntactic complexity of stimuli. A dichoptic procedure was chosen. A subject faced a viewing screen on which…

This paper discusses Lee and Canter's procedure for assessing child language development as an example of how psycholinguistics is beginning to enter the language clinic. The procedure includes recording and transcribing examples of children's sentences, then scoring them to yield a Developmental Sentence Score (DDS). This procedure was compared…

To determine the principal differences in syntactic structure between spoken and written American English, a corpus of the spoken (800 sentences) and written (280 sentences) utterances of six graduate students was described in terms of a transformational generative grammar. These utterances were used as a basis for a two-part grammar: (1) a source…

This paper surveys the principles and findings from the field of linguistics that have been brought to bear on questions dealing with learning to read, the analysis of the reading process, and the sources of reading failure. It is intended to guide the reader through the significant areas in the literature and to note specific works. Section 1…

This paper reports part of a longitudinal study to assess the psycholinguistic abilities of rural children given various educational opportunities. Twenty-two kindergartens were established, each with a teacher and a teacher aide. Prior to the opening of school, the staff was exposed to a six-week intensive training session. An inservice training…

Three papers, based on a study done with 160 Wisconsin fourth- and sixth-graders, are presented in an attempt to contribute to the psycholinguistic information needed in developing elementary English language learning programs. The first paper, "A Linguistic Ability Test for Elementary Grades," discusses a written test made up of 15 linguistic…

Two parallel and complementary studies of Language Modelling and its relation to the development of communicative competence in the young child are reported. Over a 6-month period, Study 1 involved weekly naturalistic observations (in the home) of the nature and quality of the linguistic stimulation offered by mothers to their children between 2…

Four papers discuss the Harvard Preschool Project whose goal is to learn how to structure the experiences of the first six years of life to encourage maximal development of human competence. To determine what competence at age 6 is, a group of 13 highly competent 6-year-olds of mixed residence, class, and ethnicity were compared to a like group of…

The problem of interference caused by linguistic transfer in second language learning does not increase with the number of languages that the student has acquired. The ability to learn a second, third, or fourth language depends on what Chomsky calls "the language acquisition device," which is a capacity or a sensitivity formed by a combination of…

There is a difference between learning a second language and learning a second dialect; the English as a second language (ESL) program should be limited to teaching English to students who do not already know English. Although there are not enough ESL programs, there is also a problem that some students are receiving ESL instruction even though…