THE LITERATURE ON LANGUAGE ABILITY AND ITS RELATIONSHIP TO ACADEMIC SUCCESS INCREASINGLY VOICES ALARM THAT THE CULTURALLY DISADVANTAGED ARE SERIOUSLY DEFICIENT IN LANGUAGE ABILITY. INTERVENTION PROGRAMS CREATED TO CORRECT THIS PROBLEM ALL RECOGNIZE THE IMPORTANCE OF LANGUAGE TOOLS FOR INTELLECTUAL FUNCTIONING. ESSENTIAL TO SUCH PROGRAMS, AND…

This dissertation examines the thesis that it is the human language system which largely makes possible the human capacity for modifiability of responses called "intelligent" and "adaptive" modes of interaction with the environment. Chapter titles are (1) A Process View of Human Behavior, (2) Aspects of the Multi-Dimensional Nature of Cognitive…

This paper reports the findings of an investigation into the development of the use and understanding of locative and temporal prepositions in 94 children aged from 18 months to 8 years. The research was carried out as part of the Project "Language Development in Pre-School Children," directed by Gordon Wells, at the University of…

The hypothesis that the acquisition order of relational words directly reflects the complexity of these words in formal linguistic analysis was tested for the singular, non-neuter person pronouns of English. Data on the development of comprehension of these pronouns gathered in two conversational situations, child as person addressed and child as…

This paper describes the notation and underlying organization of an augmented, recursive-transition network grammar and illustrates how such a grammar is a natural medium for expressing and explaining a wide variety of facts about the psychological processes of sentence comprehension. A general discussion of transformational grammar and…

The dominant trend in phonetics today--due to a large extent to generative phonology--is to discover the brain mechanisms underlying the observed behavior in speech. Among other things there is interest in attempting to find out how motor programs are stored latently, selected, activated into muscular contractions, controlled, and tailored for…

Reexamines the question of why pattern practice fails by hypothesizing about the information processing activities that they entail. (Author/CFM)

Investigation of the monitoring behavior of Turkish children speaking Dutch as a second language found that subjects' use repairs increased or decreased with a certain age. A positive relationship was found between monitoring use and subjects' cognitive skills and second language proficiency. (27 references) (Author/CB)

In order to build robust natural language processing systems that can detect and recover from miscommunication, the investigation of how people communicate and how they recover from problems in communication described in this artificial intelligence report focused on reference problems which a listener may have in determining what or whom a…

One of a regular series on the status and progress of studies on the nature of speech, instrumentation for its investigation, and practical applications, this report covers the period January 1 to March 31, 1985. Studies summarized in the report cover such topics as (1) segmentation of coarticulated speech in perception (2) intrinsic time in…

In analyzing the issue of the extent to which speaking a nonstandard dialect of English affects a child's ability to learn to read, this paper reviews linguistic and reading research from the 1960s to the present and notes how that research has changed and developed. Based on this research, the paper argues that (1) there is no direct causal…

A study was carried out to test the hypothesis that a difference exists between the results of a paradigmatic/syntagmatic word association test given in an individual's native language and in his second language. The sample used in this study consists of 23 Iranian officers attending a course at Air University in Alabama. Their primary language is…

A set of procedures for coding internal state words (those words representing mental states and perceptual experiences), developed for application to data on the language of young children and those with whom they converse, is described in this report. The report first discusses the rationale for studying cultural variation in vocabulary use, the…

The assumption that question-answer sequences consist of two moves was examined using data from recordings of second-grade classrooms in Austin, Texas. Interactions initiated by children's spontaneous questions in informal, small group settings were evaluated. Twenty-nine dialogue samples are presented and analyzed. Four issues in the study of…

A discussion of word acquisition rates and strategies is based upon a 6-month case study of an Estonian-speaking child who gradually and systematically relaxed phonotactic constraints to allow greater complexity in word production. In addition to the cognitive tools of assimilation and accomodation as described by Piaget, the child used a further…