Describes the acquisition and use of a Chinese metalanguage with which ambiguous spoken words are graphically contextualized. The metalanguage is composed of strategies that range from the actual writing of the Chinese graph (character) to those where the graph is accommodated in a verbal presentation. (12 references) (JL)

Supports a greater use of repeated recordings and elicited intuitions by sociolinguists in assessing the linguistic competence of individuals or groups. A replication of an earlier implicational analysis of pronominal variation in the Guyanese creole continuum shows that, with repeated sampling and the inclusion of elicited intuitions, the…