Questions asked in five play sessions by each of eight children aged 1.6 to 3.0 were analyzed for usage of the wh-interrogatives. About 93% of utterances using "what" and "where" were formulaic constructions (e.g., "Where's NP?" and "What's that thing?"). In order to determine whether children were…

While editors have no way of encoding most of the features of the human voice, they are often able to use punctuation and other devices to give the impression of speech. While retaining many distinctive features of a personal voice is possible in writing, considerations of voice are inseparable from considerations of textual features and audience…

An explanatory linguistic theory attempts to capture and explain the universal nature of human language, to choose among possible grammars of each human language, and to account for the linguistic constraints involved in language acquisition. Discourse theory, like linguistic theory, must be mentalistic in that it seeks to account for mental…

This examination of an evaluation of writing based on process rather than on product argues that one of the primary functions of evaluation as a part of teaching should be to diagnose the writing strategies that underlie a writer's current performance, not just textual problems. The first half of the paper discusses the various ways teachers use…

Noting that little effort has been devoted to the precise use of the term "theory" in rhetorical theory studies, this paper argues that, for the sake of scholarly precision in research, it is important to establish parameters of the term and to distinguish it from related terms and concepts. The paper reviews the advantages of the use of theory,…

This paper proposes a general principle of topic resources as a key principle of conversation. The first section of the paper offers a discussion of the notion of cohesion as a condition in which interactants perceive that their utterances are related to one another and presents the "given-new" strategy (in which the interactants…

This paper advocates the view of readability as an interaction between text structure and the cognitive processes and structures possessed by a reader. A simulation model of prose comprehension that yields predictions of both propositional recall and text readability based on the frequencies of different processing events is discussed. The paper…

Several theories of story structure are reviewed in this paper, including those of D. Rumelhart, R. Schank, and T. van Dijk. Examples are given of Rumelhart's story grammar consisting of elements such as setting, episodes, events, and reactions that must be present to form a coherent structure. Schank's contribution to story structure theory is…

An investigation into the types of propositions used in criminal trials reveals that the question being adjudicated in criminal trials is a proposition of fact that may or may not be influenced by policy and value considerations. The argument is offered that the proposition of fact identifies the ultimate issue in a legal debate. While value…

A model has been developed for studying the relation between text structure and reading comprehension, emphasizing the reader's use of world knowledge and text-structural knowledge to evaluate and interpret meaning from text. When the highlights of the model are considered from the perspective of various expository texts used in research on…

The speech of two two-year-old Mandarin-speaking children was taped during free play in their homes. The following characteristics of their speech were discovered: (1) excellent, near full control of tones; (2) somewhat stricter word order than is found in adult speech (Mandarin is undergoing a word order shift from SVO to SOV); and (3) few…

The spontaneous speech of 14 children aged 2;6 to 5;6 was recorded. One additional child provided longitudinal information from age 2;4 to 5;6. In a second study, 75 children were tested for mastery of hypothetical reference in a story-telling situation. The speech samples from Study 1 and the children's answers from Study 2 were analyzed for…

The first phase of an ongoing study of communication in a naturalistic situation in which children talked to familiar children is described in this paper. The situation was one that encouraged pretend (or dramatic) play. Research was focused on (1) the amount of pretend play; (2) the amount of speech used for planning or managing the play; and (3)…

To conceptualize a reader's comprehension of text as a semantic and interpretive processing of information, it is necessary to take note of interactions among persons and texts and conditions under which the texts are to be comprehended. A Computer-Assisted Language Analysis System (CALAS) was constructed which focuses on the text as any…

Narratives about personal experiences were elicited from 33 kindergarten children in a suburb of Zurich. The narratives were analyzed for the development of the use of the particle "ebe" from a conversational context (where the use of the particle was already mastered) to an appropriate narrative context (in which the particle, as…