Crib-talk between identical twin girls and diary records of their speech were examined. It was found that the subjects developed conventional syntax and vocabulary but adapted them in ways which appropriately expressed their twin status. (Author/SED)

Three- and four-year-old children were asked to perform a judgement task in which they chose between incorrect English transitives and intransitives and their correct adult equivalents. Purely semantic or syntactic models fail to explain the findings as well as does a model based on semantic/syntactic transitivity. (SED)

Discusses a quantitative study of the use of Australian Questioning Intonation (AQI) in Sydney, which reveals that it has the social distribution characteristic of a language change in progress. The social motivations of AQI are examined in terms of local identity and the entry of new ethnic groups into the community. (Author/SED)

Assesses the interrelations among the functional properties of maternal speech, the structural properties of maternal speech, and child language growth for a period of six months for 22 two-year-old children and their mothers. (HOD)

Investigates relationships between syntactic awareness and reading proficiency. Fourth- and fifth-grade children of varying decoding ability differed in syntactic awareness according to their ability to correct grammatically deviant sentences in an oral language task. Significant correlations were observed between task results and measures of…

Investigates the hypothesis that letters to lower-status recipients would consist of a greater number of more familiar modes than letters to higher-status recipients and that letters to recipients of high solidarity with the writer would consist of a greater number of more familiar modes than letters to recipients of low solidarity with the…

Describes a continuum of types of drama activities to be used in second language learning. Activities near the top end of the continuum are more suitable for teaching the forms of the target language; activities near the bottom end are more suitable for teaching the functions of the language. (SED)

Reveals that in the average number of words per T-unit, the complexity of basal reader passages generally exceeds that of children's oral language, and that none of the basal series studied exhibited a graduated increase in average number of words per T-unit among passages in the same reader. (FL)

Classroom activities using graffiti as a point of departure for reading comprehension, creative expression, and discussion are outlined. (MSE)

Describes a study that explores whether less fluent non-native listeners attend more to syntactic than to semantic cues by testing three groups: native English-speakers and advanced and intermediate non-natives. Results show that semantically acceptable responses increased progressively for intermediate, advanced, and native groups, while…

Discusses the differences between the English native and nonnative speaker's creation and use of nominal compounds. A comparison between English speakers and Japanese native speakers indicates that not only must nonnative speakers acquire rules in order to effectively compound words in English, but that rules must indeed exist, indicating that…

Describes a sequence of four studies that explored how people composed sentences while writing expository essays. Among the findings were that the sentence composition process was often guided by a writing plan, and the most frequent changes accomplished by revision of parts were word choice, aspect of meaning, and grammatical structure. (HOD)

Three critics comment on weaknesses in Louis G. Ceci's September 1983 "College English" article, "The Case for Syntactic Imagery," and Ceci responds. (CRH)

Suggests structure based on two sets of principles for deriving meaning from data: Shannon's measure of entropy, which provides means of measuring amount of information in message; and Ranganathan's faceted classification scheme, which provides means of determining number of meaningful data. Syntax, meaning, and semantics of data are discussed.…

Reports on a study that examined the development of audience-adapted writing skills between the end of elementary school and the beginning of college, concluding that all students demonstrated sensitivity to the needs of a young reader. (HOD)