Children's early writing is analyzed in this paper according to different perspectives such as function, grapho-phonemics, syntax, and semantics. Emphasis is given to the semantic perspective of decoding the text and to the study of coherence in text as it is viewed by the reader. Proposition analysis is used to map the coherence of samples of…

Different languages code messages in different ways and use different channels for sending messages; thus there are many places for misinterpreting and mishearing messages in an intercultural context. To move from one language to another requires a description of the total language communication system, one that has its universals in social and…

The practice of playing taped spoken French just before the beginning of a regular foreign language class rests on the premise that regular exposure to unedited foreign speech sensitizes one to its unique intonation, rhythm, and sounds. It is hypothesized that the ability to identify a language may be the first step in listening. A review of…

Twenty-four adults participated in an experiment to determine the difficulty of conditional sentences of the kinds frequently found in the instructions in government forms. The stimulus materials were 128 sentence frames of the form, "If you are X, press button Y," where X was replaced by sixteen different coordinate structures. These…

Forty-five children drawn equally from nursery school, kindergarten, and first grade were administered a nonverbal imitation task, a production task, a comprehension task, and a verbal imitation task. The results of the four tasks support the Temporal Complexity Hypothesis, which states that the components of temporality--order among events (O),…

This paper reviews the research on second language acquisition and bilingualism conducted in Canada over the past decade (1970-79). The material on second language acquisition is presented under the followinq headings: approaches to second language instruction, individual differences and second language acquisition, and effects of second language…

Narrative observations were made of remedial interchanges occurring among school children (K-4) in open classrooms. Transcripts of interchanges were typed move by move and coded according to a hierarchical coding scheme (remedy, defiance, no response, relief, ending, and ambiguous). The interchanges of the kindergarteners and first graders were…

Children, four, six, eight, and twelve years old, and adults participated in a study of judgments of syllable similarity. Subjects listened to a disyllabic nonsense unit (the standard) followed by two comparison stimuli; they were then asked to choose the comparison stimulus "most like" the standard. Changes between the comparison stimuli and the…

An experiment was conducted to investigate the hypothesis that English cliches reflect sex-specific styles of speech and that sex-specificity of expressions is related to differential usage by male and female speakers. Hypotheses were derived from Tyler's claims that the "neutral sphere" is infused by the male style, rendering it an inhibiting…

The use of "wh" forms in questions asked by four children was recorded from age 22 to 36 months, and analyzed. In the emergence of "wh" forms, the children first asked identifying questions with "what" and "who," followed in order by (1) "wh" pronominal questions which ask for major sentence…

Folk tales were read to 32 kindergarten children of varying levels of language ability, as measured by the language scale of the Metropolitan Readiness Test. Recall protocols were parsed into the categories described by N. L. Stein and C. G. Glenn. Low ability children were found to be less likely to recall details of "internal plan" and…

Preschoolers' ability to utilize language in spatial problem solving was tested with 64 predominately middle-class children. The number of correct responses was analyzed using an age/sex/medium analysis of variance. It was found that the verbal response mode leads to substantially more correct responses than do pictures and that girls performed…

Swedes in four different age groups (9, 12, 15 and 18 years) judged written words which varied in three dimensions: syntactic category, objective frequency, and polysemy (multiple meaning). The subjects judged ease of comprehension of 24 words in a factorial arrangement. The method used was Thurstone's paired comparisons. A predicted complex…

This volume reports on the results of a survey conducted to determine the language attitudes of South Africans. Speakers of Afrikaans as a first language (Afrikaners) appear more willing than native speakers of English (ESSAs) to use a second language (L2), but only outside the family circle. The ESSA feels comfortable using the L2 with the…

Philosophical works and sociological writings from the seventeenth through the twentieth century are analyzed in this paper to learn the degree to which their use of generics (linguistic terms such as "mankind" that are used to refer to all humans) can be said to have actual reference to all adults without consideration of sex. The paper notes…