This study describes the segmental phonemes of five 4-year-old speakers of Black English, and analyzes both their language development and ethnic characteristics. The study group of Negro children, born and living in Washington, D.C., came from homes that met two of three specified criteria based on the mother's education and family income. The…

Ongoing research conducted by the Welsh Language Research Unit of Cardiff, Wales is described. This research has concentrated mainly on recording and describing the phonology of some varieties of Welsh spoken in South-East Wales, particularly as it is associated with geographic areas and affected by population changes resulting from industrial…

This essay discusses a theory of grammar which incorporated Chomsky's distinction between deep and surface structure and accepts Fillmore's proposal to exclude such subject and concepts as direct object from the base structure. While recognizing the need for specifying an underlying set of caselike relations, it is proposed that this need can best…

Shilha, which is spoken in southwest Morocco, is one of the most widely distributed of the Berber languages. The dialect described in the work is found in the area extending from Agadir to Ifni and as far east as Taroudant. This study provides a general description of the structure of the language by examing the phonology, morphology, major form…

Thirteen Mexican-American children in Corpus Christi, Texas, most approximately six years old, were interviewed in Spanish for the purpose of establishing the phonology of their dialect. The linguistic competence of the children, not their performance, was of primary interest. A phonological chart was devised based on the data derived from the…

The major purpose of this study was to contrast the responses of three groups of subjects to a language attitude questionnaire focusing on non-mainstream language patterns. The three groups were writers in the area of sociolinguistics, students who were enrolled in an experimental sociolinguistic-oriented instructional module, and students…

Because of the tendency to reject Black English speakers, perhaps as an excuse for maintaining social and racial prejudices, teachers should understand that nonstandard dialects result from geographical and/or cultural isolation and conflict (as in Applachian English), and from linguistic conflict (as in Chicano English). The language of many…

Intonation patterns of Black English were studied and compared with those occurring in White English and formal Black English. It was found that: (1) the Black English corpus was characterized by a wider pitch range, extending into higher pitch levels than either the White vernacular or the formal Black English of the adult information; (2) a…

This work asserts that contrastive analysis should be regarded as a technique of research and not limited to error prediction and material preparation. Introductory observations are made on the state of the field, the domain of contrastive analysis, contrastive analysis and transfer, and contrastive analysis and foreign language instruction. In…

The purposes of this study were to investigate the relation between knowledge of formatives and knowledge of formative derivatives and the relation between knowledge of nonformatives and knowledge of nonformative derivatives, and to determine if the first relation is greater than the second. The subjects were 178 college freshmen who were enrolled…

Developed as part of a high school quinmester unit on sentences, this guide provides the teacher with teaching strategies for a study of the acceptable patterns of kernel sentences and transformation, identification of rhetorical styles in prose and poetry, and the application of these principles to produce a variety of effective sentences. The…

This test booklet is designed for use with the workbook for the Introductory Unit of the beginning audiolingual Latin course. The tests review syllable division in Latin, Latin cognates, sentence structure, verbs, adjective agreement, and case. The tests correspond to workbook lessons. For related material, see FL 004 156-60. (DD)

While sequencing of speaking turns occurs in both adult and child systems, the adult system is elaborated by nonverbal signaling of speaker/listener roles and is constrained by expectations of speaking turns responsive to a shared topic. Children's speaking turns are not accompanied regularly by nonverbal signals; the speaker role does not require…

The thesis of this paper is that the "do so" test described by Lakoff and Ross (1966) is a test of the speaker's belief system regarding the relationship of verbs to their surface subject, and that judgments of grammaticality concerning "do so" are based on the speaker's underlying semantic beliefs. ("Speaker" refers here to both speakers and…

Any theory of language acquisition must take into account the actual speech heard by children during the acquisition period. When 8 well-educated mothers were tape-recorded talking to their daughters, ages 16 to 30 months, it was found that their speech differed significantly from that spoken to another adult. The mothers used a more restricted…