The depth and pervasiveness of linguistic symbols of sexual identity, difference, and hierarchy are discussed in this paper. After noting that the language of sexism begins at birth and is recognized and used by preschool children, the paper points to patterns of linguistic sexism in the semantics and syntax of the English language, in written and…

Data from eleven different languages were collected to study the uses of deictic verbs of motion in order to discover possible universals for the semantics of such verbs. The languages, many of them unrelated or distantly related, are: Croatian, English, German, Indonesian, Japanese, Mandarin, Nepali, Spanish, Tamil, Thai, and Turkish. Native…

A study was conducted to test whether three, four, and five-year-old children would be better able to use either static or dynamic properties for grouping objects, and whether performance under these conditions would be better than when no property was given. One of the two study tasks, the free sort, also used by Rosch et al. (1976), asked…

A model of human information processing is summarized and discussed in terms of the implications of the model and its associated technologies for curriculum research and development. Description of the model focuses on its input and output systems and its memory systems, i.e., long-term memory (LTM). Semantic networks are described as a…

Typically, teachers approach ambiguity in student writing by suggesting that students focus on diction, syntax, and writing format; however, the works of modernists (including T.S. Eliot, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Karl Marx, and Pablo Picasso) suggest the importance of conceptions of semantic clarity. Transformational models for syntactic elements in…

Sex-related language stereotypes and sex-related differences in language usage are examined in this paper, and some recent research findings that illuminate them are reported. The following topics are among those discussed: seemingly universal characterizations of women's speech as gossip, nagging, or chatting, partially explained by most…

Teaching children to read letters first is regarded by many theorists as the foundation on which the teaching of words should be based. To test this assumption, 26 nursery school children were presented four items (two letters and two words) in a paired associate learning paradigm. The subjects were randomly divided into two groups for the purpose…

The middle childhood years are a period of refinement of the semantics and syntax acquired in the early years, of substantial metalinguistic development, and of subtle changes in actual processing strategies. In a study undertaken to determine how these three factors interact, children aged 6 to 11 were asked to produce and recognize paraphrases.…

The semantic change which has occurred in an Austrian community over the past seventy-five years is examined. The study is based on a comparison of an 1897 word list, sound inventory, and phonograph recording with 1973 recordings of sixty informants from four age groups and five socioeconomic strata. In Inmst, the development from an…

A group test and individual interviews were used to investigate quantitative and qualitative aspects of students' vocabularies. Subjects for the group test were 144 high-, middle-, and low-ability fourth and sixth graders. Subjects for the interviews were eight high- and low-ability third and fifth graders. The group test consisted of two forms of…

Although the acts of reading literature and writing are closely linked, literature study and composition instruction remain distinct pursuits within college English departments. Style seems to be an interest that unifies the two pursuits. The most common view of style equates it with acceptable rhetorical and grammatical conventions. A second view…

A study was conducted of the language development of a hearing child whose mother was deaf and communicated only in sign and whose father was hearing and communicated in both sign and oral language. Results showed similarities in development between the two modalities as well as similarity between development in two separate modalities and two…

A total of 113 seventh grade students participated in a study to test the effectiveness of sentence combining practice as a means to significantly improve syntactic and semantic fluency in student writing. Methods included pretest, posttest, and delayed posttest t-unit analyses of syntactic fluency, and four pretest and posttest analyses of…

Developmental patterns in the solution of verbal analogies, especially the recognition of higher-order analogical relations, were traced. The investigation sought to: (1) provide new developmental tests of a componential theory of analogical reasoning; (2) identify strategy changes during the transition from midchildhood (grade 3) to adulthood…

This report is one in a regular series on the status and progress of speech research. The 11 manuscript topics are: towards a theoretical reassessment of the role of proprioception in the perception and control of human movement, interarticulator programing in stop production, the beginnings of speech, proofreading errors on the word "the," the…