Children ages 1 1/2 to 3 years were tested to determine their comprehension of the terms "in,""on," and "under." It was found that children who listened to a pretest story involving the objects to be used in the study showed markedly better comprehension of the terms than children not exposed to the pretest activity.…

Different experimental techniques for empirical assessment of children's linguistic ability have produced conflicting evidence. A number of such contradictions are discussed, in the context of an analysis of the potential weaknesses, and consequent requirements, of both comprehension and production tasks. (A commentary by P. L. Harris appears on…

In an examination of speaker-induced variability in an auditory perceptual test, recordings of the PBK word list were mixed with white noise and played to a group of normal hearing college students and a group of normal hearing junior high school students. (Author/CL)

This report describes research in progress at Duisburg University on a modification of the cloze principle in language testing. Four problem areas in classical cloze tests are isolated and discussed, namely, text selection, test construction, scoring, and interpretation. The "C-tests" in the process of development use the theoretical…

The purpose of this research was to compare two different forms of a placement test in French as a second language at the post-secondary level, a conventional test and a computerized test. First, expectations regarding a placement test as a measure of general proficiency are discussed and principles of adaptive testing that have been used to…

The study investigated the issue of differential selection of foils (incorrect responses) with Black English structures by black and white examinees. Linguistic research revealed systematic differences between Black English and Standard American English. Grammatical and phonological features were important distinctions. Five categories of Black…