In a study concerned with the function of test wiseness in competency testing and with the impact of question stem structure within a reading competency test, 43 fourth grade students and 38 sixth grade students were administered one form each of the experimental material. This material consisted of ten questions presented in the stylized language…

The major concern of the educational system in Israel today is how to advance students who come from low socioeconomic backgrounds and from a cultural background which is different from that of the privileged sectors of the population. In general, the problem of educationally disadvantaged students is related to the problem of social gaps. These…

THIS STUDY OF LANGUAGE PRESENTS A SPECIFIC, SYSTEMATIC DESCRIPTION OF THE WAYS IN WHICH A SPEAKER ADJUSTS HIS MANNER OF SPEAKING ACCORDING TO THE CONTEXT IN WHICH HE EMPLOYS LANGUAGE. FOUR USAGE-SCALES OF "NATIVE CENTRAL ENGLISH" ARE INTRODUCED--AGE, BREADTH, RESPONSIBILITY, AND STYLE. A KNOWLEDGE OF THESE FOUR DIMENSIONS HOPEFULLY WILL OVERCOME…

MUTUAL INTELLIGIBILITY, WHICH SEEMS TO HAVE BEEN THE INITIAL BASIS FOR CHINESE DIALECT CLASSIFICATION, ALONG WITH GEOGRAPHIC PROXIMITY HAS PROVIDED A FAIRLY REALISTIC GROUPING OF THE MANDARIN DIALECTS. IT NOW SEEMS DESIRABLE TO WORK OUT A FORMAL DEFINITION IN PRECISE LINGUISTIC TERMS OF WHAT CONSTITUTES A MANDARIN DIALECT AND TO DISCOVER WHETHER…

IN AN ATTEMPT TO BRIDGE THE GAP BETWEEN PSYCHOPHYSICAL STUDIES OF HUE DISCRIMINATION AND ETHNOLINGUISTIC STUDIES OF HUE LABELING, AN EXPERIMENT WAS CONDUCTED COMPARING LABELING AND DISCRIMINATION FUNCTIONS FOR SPEAKERS OF INDO-EUROPEAN (AMERICAN ENGLISH) AND NON-INDO-EUROPEAN (MEXICAN INDIAN) LANGUAGES. IT WAS FOUND THAT HUE LABELING PATTERNS OF…

THIS 7-YEAR LONGITUDINAL STUDY OF THE LANGUAGE SKILLS OF 338 OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA, SCHOOL CHILDREN UTILIZES A SCIENTIFIC APPROACH TO THE STUDY OF BOTH THE SEMANTIC AND STRUCTURAL ASPECTS OF LANGUAGE. A SPECIFIC METHOD OF LANGUAGE ANALYSIS HAS BEEN SHAPED. THE "SEGMENTATION" METHOD OF ANALYSIS USES SEVERAL TYPES OF SENTENCE SEGMENTS. A…

A SEQUENTIAL, INSTRUCTIONAL STRATEGY WAS PRESENTED FOR DECODING LETTERS INTO SOUND. THE STRATEGY WAS INTENDED TO COMPLEMENT INSTRUCTIONAL PROGRAMS IN BEGINNING READING. LETTER-SOUND CORRESPONDENCES AND CONCEPTS WERE PROVIDED FOR ALL LETTERS OF THE ALPHABET AS THEY MIGHT OCCUR IN VARYING POSITIONS TO FORM ENGLISH WORDS. OF THE VOWELS, ONLY TWO…

A CONFERENCE WAS HELD TO PRODUCE A DESCRIPTION OF NEEDED RESEARCH IN THE AREA OF THE INSERVICE RETRAINING OF ELEMENTARY SCHOOL TEACHERS IN THE ALLIED AREAS OF LANGUAGE, LITERATURE, COMPOSITION, SPEECH, AND READING. FIVE POSITION PAPERS ON EACH AREA WERE READ ON THE 1ST DAY, AND THE LAST 2 DAYS OF THE CONFERENCE WERE SPENT DEVELOPING COMMITTEE…

Traditionally, reading disabled children have been characterized as suffering a performance or process deficit that prevents them from acquiring the knowledge and skills underlying proficient reading and comprehension. Such explanations raise some logical problems. Process oriented theories do not adequately explain the specificity nor address the…

A study was conducted to investigate the ability of children to determine meanings of derived words that have undergone a pronunciation shift while retaining a close orthographic relationship to their base words. A researcher-designed test was constructed using derived words that had their base word included in a "core list" of words at or below…

This master's thesis focuses on the relationship between children's development of communicative competence and patterns of communication between children and their primary caregivers. An overview of major changes, since the 1950s, in the theoretical and empirical approaches to language development is presented in Chapter II. Within this overview,…

As Labov points out (1971), language is a social phenomenon, and therefore must be studied in its social context; sex based language differences, being part of language, must be studied in the same way. Specifically, sex based language differences can be studied by modifying the sociolinguists' notion of speech community and speech continuum, and…

Linguists of various theoretical backgrounds have likened second language (L2) acquisition to pidginization (Ferguson 1971, Richards 1971, Bickerton 1975a). This paper examines these two processes and suggests areas where a study of the process of second language acquisition in a natural setting might contribute insights to a general theory of…

Previous accounts of "generic" have been either too broad in including several sentence types as generic, or too narrow in limiting the definition of generic to the noun or verb alone. This research critically examines data and previous treatments of the generic verb, generic noun, and generic sentence. Because every generic sentence may…

The effect of a mute "e" on preceding consonant pairs was studied in the oscillographic tapings of the pronunciation of three well-educated Frenchmen. The 68 taped phrase pairs, showing the consonant in a primary and secondary (followed by mute "e") position, are listed. The differences betwee n the length of the first consonant, second consonant,…