A study was conducted to compare the relative performance on yes-no questions of bilingual and monolingual children and to discuss the relationship of semantic development and linguistic development, both in the bilinguals and monolinguals. Eighteen English monolingual, eighteen Japanese monolingual, and eighteen Japanese-English bilingual…

Designed to help instructors become aware of factors that may interfere with teaching composition to Mexican-American students, this paper surveys research findings about attitudes toward Spanish-speaking persons in the United States and about language patterns and attitudes of Mexican Americans. It then briefly recommends techniques for working…

This study is based on a sample of about 100 languages with numeral classifiers. An attempt is made at reconstructing the dynamics of the process by which such systems arise, develop, and decay. Among the hypotheses advanced are the following: (1) numeral classifiers involve the overt expression of one kind of quantification, namely, counting by…

This paper gives the results of a controlled experiment on word association. The purpose was to establish norms of commonality of primary descriptive adjective responses to common nouns. The stimuli consisted of 203 common nouns selected from 10 everyday topics of conversation, approximately 20 from each topic. There were 350 subjects, 50% male,…

Formality as a style may be defined as language which reflects or "keynotes" the degree of familiarity between participants in a discourse. Working from this assumption, this paper attempts to answer the question, "How is formality best described?" Results of a series of tests indicate that informants' labels (with the…

The reflexes of the proto-Bantu noun class prefixes of the form "mu-,""mi-," and "ma-" are compared in 84 Bantu languages. The hypotheses that syllabic nasals arise preferably from sequences of m + rounded high vowel, rather than m + unrounded high vowel, are tested against the data. The approach is an example of intragenetic comparison discussed…

This bibliography contains references to materials relating to language learning and development in the young child, specifically, speaking and understanding language. Receptive, communicative and expressive language as well as particular facets of language imitation and production are topics included. Reference materials are listed in four major…

These transcriptions of conversation illustrate linguistic behavior and interests of the average ten-year-old French child. Patterned after a previously transcribed series of conversations of nine-year olds, the 14 dialogues in this collection serve as a linguistic corpus suitable for educational research and textbook development. A graphic code…

Automatic speech recognition is expected to be more successful when syntactically-related information is incorporated into early stages of recognition. Phonemic decisions, in particular, are expected to be more accurate and less ambiguous when contextual information is considered. A computer program detected about 90% of all boundaries between…

Within the realm of psycholinguistics there is a need to investigate linguistic performance based on the generative transformational concept of linguistic competence, i.e., based on the speaker-listener's knowledge of his language. Psycholinguistics must determine how underlying knowledge is related to overt performance. The nominalization and…

The experiment described in this report considers whether children who learn a second language will develop the same semantic system as monolingual children or whether their semantic system will be different because of linguistic or cultural interference, and also whether the bilingual child develops separate meaning systems for his two languages…

Going beyond mere grammaticality, this book examines the basic writing skills of a group of community college students in Hawaii for errors in idiomaticity, or native-like appropriateness of expression. The book suggests criteria for the classification of "phrasematic" expressions, and a convenient terminology comprising idioms,…

The book offers a general survey of the history of Native American languages. Chapters address these topics: Native American pidgins and trade languages; the history of American Indian linguistics and classification of languages; the origin of Native American languages; languages of North America; languages of Central America; languages of South…

A 50-item, five-point Likert scale inventory was designed to be a valid and reliable group-administered instrument to provide a profile of the declarative knowledge of electronic mail (e-mail) strategies used by students learning English as a second language (ESL) or foreign language (EFL). The inventory was developed primarily for voluntary use…

Patterns of speech from lower socioeconomic status mothers to their infants were analyzed to determine correlations with infant risk of mental retardation. Measures of maternal language included sentence form, amount of speech, and syntactic complexity. The proportion of imperatives was positively correlated with risk status and negatively…