This report examines the question of whether grammatical rules are globally learned and applied. It also attempts to determine the underlying word order in English as well as the developmental sequence of the acquisition of Aux. A sentence-repetition test using positive statements, positive questions, and negative questions was administered to 30…

Some aspects of a theory of grammar are presented which derive from a formal theory of language acquisition. One aspect of the theory is a universal constraint on analyzability known as the Freezing Principle, which supplants a variety of constraints proposed in the literature. A second aspect of the theory is the Invariance Principle, a…

Research on the role of semiosis--a process in which something functions as a sign to an organism--in information processes is described. The object of the study is the structure of various types of signs, and a determination of the relationship between sign structure and information properties. The two goals focused on during the period for which…

Linguistic cues evoke prestructured beliefs in people's minds regarding the nature and causes of public problems. Political language can shape people's opinions and thereby shape events. There appear to be two beliefs or myths that people use to explain social problems: the first sees the sufferer as responsible for his own plight in a basically…

The packet contains materials for use in a workshop intended to increase educators' sensitivity to possible discriminatory factors in testing instruments and practices. Among the materials are directions for leaders on preparing and running the workshop; 20 booklets entitled "How Can Tests Be Unfair?" for workshop participants; and…

Throughout the centuries in Spain, the Castilians and Catalans have shared cultural, social, political, generational, and human experiences. This exchange was bound to have a linguistic influence of the Castilian on the Catalan language. (In Catalonia bilingualism is prevalent, and in Castile it is not.) While there have been lexical changes, the…

The annual bulletin of the French 8 section of the Annual Meeting of the Modern Language Association of America is presented with the texts of papers read at both the 1969 and 1970 sessions. The 1970 papers, in French, include Jean Louis Darbelnet's "Etude Sociolinguistique des contacts entre 1'Anglais et le Francais au Canada et en…

This study focused upon (1) whether the errors of sixth-grade children in spelling American English words were related to the dialect spoken by the children, and (2) what effect the teaching of phoneme-grapheme correspondence rules based upon a single dialect pattern would have on the spelling of second-grade children. First, eight sixth-grade…

This course in Ga was designed for use by a teacher who is a professional linguist, perhaps with the assistance of a native speaker of Ga. In preparing the course, the authors had in mind that Ga has not yet been accorded the detailed description and analysis that some other Ghanian languages have received. This is especially true in matters of…

The practicing writer encounters four determinants of his use of prose. First, the language itself determines the expression: English, with its wealth of words and styles and with few traditional restrictions, provides problems of choice and temptations to overwrite. Second, the application of verse forms to the novel and a demand for consistently…

The ADD (Auditory Discrimination in Depth) Test measures the auditory perceptions basic to grasping the logic of the English writing and reading system. If the level of a subject's auditory perception--his ability to discriminate the phonemes of English and his ability to code phonemic sequences in both non-syllabic and syllabic units--can be…

The language patterns of low socioeconomic Negro, Spanish-surname, and Anglo children are sufficiently different from the middle class language patterns used in schools to put these children at a distinct educational disadvantage. By comparing the speech patterns of these children, this study sought to determine whether their language development…

As a step toward developing more controlled studies into children's language, this study attempted to develop standard stimuli to elicit eight basic sentence patterns from kindergarten children. Four stimuli were developed for each pattern. Each stimulus consisted of a stick-figure picture, a description of the picture, and a question or direction…

In the last 15 years much attention has been devoted to the identification and description of varieties (register and style) of language within the same speech community. The Research Section, Directorate of Studies, Staff Development Branch, Public Service Commission of Canada carried out three TESL-oriented linguistic studies on the…

Syntactical rule differences in black dialect that can be more helpful to young adolescents' perceptions than the corresponding rules in standard English were studied. The syntactical rule in black dialect that was identified as being more explicit than the corresponding rule in standard English was the invariant "be" verb form (as in…