The uses of the present progressive tense in informal English spoken discourse are examined, focusing on the increasing frequency of the so-called stative or non-action verbs found in the progressive aspect. Generalizations are proposed to account for: (1) the discrepancy between grammar book explanations and actual usage, and (2) the meaning of…

A controlled experiment was conducted to test the extent to which nonverbal behavior between a journalist and a politician in a televised interview influences the way in which they are perceived by a television audience. Nine test films were produced that showed different versions of an interview in which the participants exhibited aggressive or…

The creation of new words through the novel combination of English words or morphemes (e.g., "map ball" to refer to a globe) was studied and compared in 40 preschool children, 40 grade school children, and 40 adults. These made-up words or lexical innovations were collected while subjects attempted to name pictured objects and were evaluated in…

A study providing a descriptive and explanatory analysis of the representative stages of language acquisition found in a sample of 12 working-class black children ranging from 18 months to 4.6 years is reported. Previous general language research concerned with linguistic abilities of working-class black children is critically evaluated, and the…

A study investigated whether children expect color similarity to be less important than form similarity in object label extensions. Twenty 2-year-olds and 20 3-year-olds were asked to sort objects similar in either color or form in two different situations: (1) the "No Label" condition where children were asked to help the puppet put objects that…

Linguistics gives the student of literature an analytical tool whose sole purpose is to describe faithfully the workings of language. It provides a theoretical framework, an analytical method, and a vocabulary for communicating its insights--all designed to serve concerns other than literary interpretation and evaluation, but all useful for…

Methods were examined by which the results of student evaluations of instruction may be presented as one indicator of teaching effectiveness for faculty personnel committees in order to best answer the question of teaching competence. Specifically, the study examined two measures of central tendency, the median and the mean, to determine which…

Intended to (1) provide new data and reconceptualizations relevant to evolving debates, (2) present summaries of current theoretical positions, and (3) in some cases, to juxtapose radically different opinions in a rapidly growing field, this volume offers a number of views on topics concerning visual word recognition. In chapter 1, Thomas H. Carr…

The empirical study of knowledge representation is the focus of this paper, which observes that language as the cognitive instrument in the communication of phenomena must be capable of expressing relations of the observer-observation kind. The paper points out that this implies a coopeartive process at work in the production of a text, of which…

This study investigated the relationship between leadership style and the personality (patterns of core strengths) of school administrators as perceived by themselves and by their subordinates and colleagues. Sixty-seven principals and central office staff and 285 of their teachers and peers from 2 school systems participated in the study. Bipolar…

This work is an attempt to explain the rationale and thinking that contributes to the "communication strategy" approach and to illustrate the practical applications of its ideas to second language teaching. It also proposes an approach to teaching based on two major goals: first, to incorporate the better features of audiolingual methods into a…

English teachers do not take their subject--language--seriously enough; command of language is what students need to find themselves and cope with the forces of society. (JH)

In this paper, one aspect of nonverbal behavior concomitant with verbalizations produced by mothers interacting with their young children is analyzed. The purpose is to examine the frequency and type of nonverbal cues accompanying verbalizations directed to the young child and to observe how these cues vary with the response of the child as well…

This word list includes more than 43,000 items, each identified by a simple word meaning. For each item, the list provides a grade level (4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 13, or 16) and a percentage score that indicates what percentage of students at that grade level understand the word. Each word-familiarity score was obtained by administering a three-choice…

This discussion is based on the results of an earlier experiment in which four groups of deaf subjects, ranging in age of first exposure to signing from birth to over eighteen, were given lists of sentences in American Sign Language to shadow and recall immediately after presentation. It was found that in terms of overall accuracy, early learners…