This newsletter reports on phenomena at the intersection of linguistics and psychoanalysis and psychiatry. This issue consists of the following articles: (1) an editorial entitled "The Many (Inter)Faces of Language," by Robert Di Pietro--observations on various approaches to the study of language, particularly psycholinguistics; (2) a…

Classic studies in second language (L2) learning offer little evidence for the validity of the notion of universals in L2 learning. The present study investigates this notion in data collected from 15 observational studies of 40 L2 learners who acquired the L2 naturally, that is, they were not taught the language in any formal ways. Interpretation…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of verbal experience on children's creative expression and to develop more precise means for interpreting and evaluating children's art. Two questions were of interest: (1) Does the experimental approach described here enable children to resist forces tending to cause stereotyped artistic…

This paper reports on a program developed to prepare teaching materials for the instruction of French to adolescents who have French as a native language but no longer speak French at home. A principal goal is to create situations that will inspire students to communicate in French, and to avoid purely academic exercises. Since students tend to…

This paper argues for a reorganization of the educational procedures in the ESL classroom, in the interest of developing communicative competence. Special emphasis is placed on the use in the classroom of only structural and phonological patterns which are easily transferrable to real-life situations. In the interest of abolishing mechanical…

The purpose of this pilot study was to provide data from which tentative conclusions could be made about adults and their ability to handle literary abstractions. A sample of 93 inmates (all male, 26 Negro, 67 white) at Sumter Correctional Institution was randomly chosen and asked to verbalize their reactions to four comic strips and to write…

This participation training (PT) study sought to determine whether microlabs (short training sessions) and instrumented (data based) exercises reduced the time needed to learn desired PT verbal behaviors; whether participant satisfaction is affected significantly; and whether any unusual problems in content, procedure, or group process arise from…

This study compared the performance of kindergarten children who had participated in a full-year Head Start program (FYHS) with that of children who had attended summer Head Start (SHS). FYHS subjects at each of two elementary schools were selected at random from eligible applicants. SHS comparison groups were made up primarily of children from…

This is the first of five volumes of recorded, transcribed conversation of 150 Spanish children from Madrid. Some 25 hours of normal, unrehearsed conversation serve as a linguistic corpus illustrative of vocabulary development at a specific age level. Half-hour recording sessions were made in groups of three, consisting of boys or girls from the…

This is the second of five volumes of recorded, transcribed conversation of 150 Spanish children from Madrid. Some 25 hours of normal, unrehearsed conversation serve as a linguistic corpus illustrative of vocabulary development at a specified age level. Half-hour recording sessions were made in groups of three, consisting of boys or girls from the…

This book explores the workings of language, explains the operation of language as a coherent system, and examines instances of effective as well as ineffective communication. Chapters deal with (1) a "meaning" approach to language and the relation of semantics to the communicator, (2) how language works and what makes it work, (3) how language…

Since speech pathologists are interested in the role nonfluent behavior may play in the onset or development of stuttering, this study compared the linguistic behavior of 17 fluent four-year-old children to that of 17 nonfluent children similar in age, intelligence, sex, sibling status, race, socioeconomic status, and education. The aspects of…

Approximately 400 low-income black sixth-grade children underwent a two-step training process to help understand fate-control. After a week of intensive achievement-motivation training, nine experimental teachers and a research team cooperatively designed a program to develop in their students the realization that their behavior in relation to…

The first of six papers included in this collection--"What is English?"--calls for a greater integration of language, literature, and composition, with special emphasis on the use of grammar as a key element in both composition and literature study. The second paper, "The Voice of the Writer," describes the gap between experience, the role of the…

While reviewing the controversial concept of describing language via the phoneme, the author spells out many problems caused by the discrepancies of phonemic theory and actual speech production. Phonological variation in actual speech utterances prompts the analysis of the phonology of language on two levels--the phonemic and the distinctive…