Researchers and educators have developed an interest in language development. Their studies focused on the cultural context in which language is learned and developed and its relationship to cognitive development. This article reviews the researchers' definitions on oracy and its social facets of language learning. Specifically, it reviews studies…

The effects of adult questioning on children's novel word acquisition during storybook reading were investigated. Three-year-olds were assigned to one of three conditions: vocabulary eliciting questions, noneliciting questions, and no questions (control). General vocabulary comprehension and novel word knowledge were equivalent across the groups…

This study examined linguistic recasts provided by 16 early childhood educators to preschool children learning English as a second language (EL2). Recasts are semantic and syntactic revisions of children's utterances. The educator-child interactions were filmed during book reading and play dough activities with small groups of four children, one…

The investigation longitudinally examined the phonetic skills of Cypriot-Greek children with late onset of expressive vocabulary. The rate of phonological development within short time increments and the identification of possible speech constraints motivating slow development of expressive language were examined. Participants were seven…

This article discusses the origin and history of three Spanish idioms: "Aqui hay gato encerrado,""Seguir en sus trece," and "La carabina de Ambrosio." (Text is in Spanish.) (CLK)

Argues that the Spanish language spoken in Puerto Rico has flaws and virtues similar to Spanish spoken in any other country. (Text is in Spanish.) (DS)

The study examined whether a difference existed between 10 learning disabled (LD) and 10 normally achieving (NA) high school students in terms of comprehension and production or use of pragmatic skills. The skills examined were pragmatic function (i.e., an utterance spoken in context with specific intent), and code-switching (i.e., modification of…

The paper examines the use of concrete symbol systems to make the transition from presymbolic to formal symbolic communication for deaf blind students. Comments focus on expressive use of concrete symbols and address two issues requiring further research: (1) the critical features of referent objects, concrete symbols, and concrete symbol arrays…

Twenty-three learning disabled (LD) children (age 8-12 years) and 15 nondisabled children (age 8-12 years) were individually administered the Luria-Nebraska Neuropsychological Battery-Children's Revision (LNNB). Means and standard deviations for each of the test's scales were computed by group, and individual T-tests were calculated for…

Presents several socio-cultural contexts where both extremes of crudeness and euphemism are customary in everyday verbal communication. (TL)

Teaching composition as involving merely syntax and paragraph structure has no clear relation to an education in the liberal arts or to significant growth in understanding. Work in mechanics needs to be subordinated to the communicative and logological (how words act rather than their content) functions of language. One hopeful approach to…

Syntactic synonymy enables the speaker to use syntactic devices to say the same thing in a number of different ways. It is based on three criteria: (1) similarity of semantic content, (2) certain syntactic similarity between the components of the synonymous structures, and (3) differences in surface structures. The third criterion separates…

The acquisition of expressive sign language was studied in four autistic children (ages 10-15 years). Ss were taught expressive sign labels for common objects using a training procedure consisting of prompting, fading, and stimulus totation. The signing of three of the Ss was found to be controlled solely by the visual cues associated with the…