An outline is provided of the contents and boundaries of three areas of competence, or systems of knowledge, that are to be minimally included in a theory of communicative competence: grammatical competence, sociolinguistic competence, and strategic competence. Grammatical competence is concerned with the rules of sentence grammar and sentence…

Partial results are presented of a study investigating the relationship between an oral interview and a cloze test in Hebrew and focusing on issues related to the oral interview procedure. An oral interview speaking test and cloze tests were administered to 106 students of Hebrew at the University of Minnesota. The taped interviews were rated by…

Relational-inference, a process associated with developmental change in performance on classification items, was investigated in two experiments. The accuracy and latency with which 20 subjects at each of 3 age levels (8, 11, and adult) stated relationships among concepts were tested. In experiment 1, 40 triplets of concepts related by a class…

A study examined sex differences in the usage and perceptions of profanity. Subjects, 135 undergraduate students (61 females and 74 males), completed a questionnaire requesting information about demographics, attitudes, and use of profanity. The initial series of questions sought to obtain a self-reported estimate of the frequency with which…

Research on the effects of bilingualism on cognitive development is reviewed, and two complementary models of bilingualism are developed to account for research results. It is suggested that research since 1960 shows a positive relationship between bilingualism and cognitive development, at least for some types of bilingualism. The advantage or…

The linguistic form of a nonliteral expression, and the context in which it occurs, can greatly influence young children's succcess or failure in assigning a meaning to a figurative expression. Experiments have shown that the same metaphorical expression can be easier to understand when expressed in a linguistic form that is familiar to young…

A careful study of second language varieties (SLVs) of English, which have not yet entered the mainstream of sociolinguistic research because of neglect and misunderstanding, shows that they are qualitatively different from the categories recognized in current sociolinguistic typology. SLVs provide some of the clearest evidence of sociocultural…

This paper undertakes the study of the occurrence of non-corresponding demonstrative forms in Spanish, Basque and English in exactly the same linguistic context. It is proposed that the differences in the choice of the demonstratives result from the differences in the kind of information that must be coded in each of the languages. Thus, I will…

This paper examines the formal and functional properties of code-switching among Mexican-American children. Two formal types of code-switching, code-mixing and code-changing, are identified, and developmental patterns in their use are discussed. Two major functional types of code-switching are also differentiated. The first, situational…

This paper: (1) examines the internal word structure of Cantonese in terms of root, stem and affix; (2) discusses general problems of word analysis in Chinese with reference to Cantonese and Mandarin; (3) examines the issue of distorted translations from Mandarin into English resulting from faulty word analysis; and (4) looks briefly at the…

This paper presents a study of metalinguistic awareness in young children. Metalinguistic awareness refers to the child's ability to concentrate on the sounds and patterns of language rather than on its communicative aspects. Metalinguistic awareness was studied by analyzing the verbal play and verbal games of 149 children from 6 months to 10…

This paper examines aspects of variation in child language, and specifically how children express causal relations in complex sentences. Four particular types of variation were observed: (1) the order of clauses and the connectives used to link clauses; (2) mothers' causal statements; (3) interaction of language form and content, in the form of…

In early transformational generative grammar, it was assumed that all semantic interpretation would be done off deep structure, but with the proposals for the extended standard theory (EST) of Chomsky (1968, 1972) came the realization that certain aspects of semantic interpretation, such as focus and presuppostion and scope of quantifiers, must be…

A descriptive research technique was applied in this study, which sought to determine the linguistic emphasis in the teaching of English grammar in the elementary schools of Texas. A questionnaire, which asked for information on the background and experience of the teachers, as well as for information on English grammar instruction in their…

This volume, intended for use in basic courses in language arts methods or in in-service training situations, presents a program of instruction based on Piaget's views of learning and the psycholinguistic perception of language acquisition and development. Throughout the discussion, language and intellectual development are related to children's…