Examines the reading and writing processes and their interdependence and urges the language arts instructor to be an audience for children's writing and to help them become aware that what they read is someone else's writing. (HTH)

A reliable clinical taxonomy of illocutionary acts for young language learning children was determined and the distributions of those illocutionary acts in naturalistic play situations with 12 Down syndrome and nondelayed children (20 to 89 months) and their mothers were examined. (Author)

Indicates in poetic form the author's doubts about electronic devices that emphasize spelling drills; notes her preference for instruction based on patterns of language. (GT)

Common language usage is considered from four perspectives: "situational" linguistics and language, "natural language," linguistic interdisciplinarity with the social sciences, and common language as a "social technology," or subject of pedagogy. (MSE)

Contends that the organization of comments made by one discourse participant on the contributions of another reveals a hierarchy of relevance and informativity. Illustrates this with discourse samples subjected to a particular method of analysis. (FL)

Students speaking Black English should not be singled out or isolated. Their dialect, like that of others whose English is accented, can contribute to the cultural richness of American classrooms at the same time that the schools are teaching these students to read and write standard English. (Author/MLF)

Argues that a fast and effective writing system need not stay close to the phonemic detail of speech, and offers shorthand systems as examples of this. Some proposals for spelling reform are briefly evaluated in the light of this evidence. (HOD)

The structure of the spontaneous language samples of nine Down's syndrome children (7 to 12 years old) was compared to that of nine nonretarded children, using the generative semantic model proposed by W. Chate. Language samples were analyzed in terms of mean length of utterance and semantic structure. (Author/SBH)

Reports on a study which explored the intonational differences between constant plus variable utterances and variable plus variable utterances, and which sought to use intonation to resolve the lexical additive vs syntactic representation of beginning productions. (AM)

Demonstrates the regularity of the structure of the present indicative in modern French. (AM)

Examines the differences in the way French and English treat contrastive stress and comparatives, with implications for translation. (AM)

Argues that in an unmarked sentence the verbs will be stressed, and that in determining patterns of sentence stress the vital consideration should be the speaker's point of view. (AM)

Compares models of Optimality Theory (OT) and Variable Rules (VR), arguing that VR is superior on theoretical and empirical grounds: constraint effects are stable, transparent, learnable. Moreover, VR's probabilistic treatment of constraint effects allows successful modeling of cases in which multiple violations of a single constraint lead to…

A study involving 12 hearing sign language users examined the effect of the signing task on temporal features of speech during simultaneous communication (SC). Results indicated longer sentence duration for SC than speech-only conditions, and longer anticipatory duration of the diphthong and interword interval preceding the experimental words.…

A study involving 20 listeners investigated the potential influence of alterations in the temporal structure of speech produced during simultaneous communication on the perception of final consonant voicing. Results found that accurate perception was not impaired by the durational changes accompanying the typically slower speech pattern of…