This study examines the object case markings "o" and "ga" in Japanese with respect to the degree of predictability. A speaker who assumes that the listener will have difficulty identifying the referent, tends to use a construction type that enables the listener to uniquely identify the referent. This notion of predictability is…

A study of children's language use in narratives given during play examined the longitudinal development of different linguistic systems of narrative structure: pronominal, clausal, and temporal. The narrative and dialogue in play with small toy figures was observed in eight children between the ages of 2 and 7. The findings suggest certain…

A study looks at young children's responses to tough movement structures, focusing on complements to "easy." The study examines the development of the two major types of rule usage: primitive and adult, and focuses on the inconsistent fluctuations between the primitive and adult levels. It is proposed that the source of complexity in…

A study was undertaken to evaluate the child's capacity to judge the acceptability of French interrogative utterances on three levels--familiar, standard, and educated. A second objective was to consider the resulting observations in the light of certain sociocultural parameters. The test, one that had been used for adults in French second…

An investigation was conducted by students in a linguistics seminar which had two parts, a matched-guise questionnaire and a semantic differential questionnaire. The content and results of the latter are presented here. The objective of this part of the study was to determine what attitudes French-speaking Swiss students had toward languages they…

This study examines quantitatively the systems of tense, mood, and aspect in Puerto Rican Spanish spoken in the United States. In the community under investigation, code-switching is an integral part of the communicative repertoire; also, the codes tend to be switched at points around which the surface structures of Spanish and English map onto…

Research is in progress on oral interactive discourse, that is, discourse produced by several participants working in collaboration. The intent of the research is to investigate how the discourse is organized at several different levels of structure (acts, sequences of acts, interactive structure, propositional content, and formal realizations).…

The three papers included in this report address typography for graphic communication, typographic access structures for educational texts, and typography as macropunctuation. The first paper considers the consequences of an aesthetic bias in the literature of typography, and identifies two misleading assumptions about textbooks; i.e., that print…

A study examined cognitive processing differences between metaphoric and literal sentences. Thirty-three undergraduate students listened to 96 test sentences (including 48 fillers) that expressed 1 meaning in either a novel or frozen metaphorical or literal form: "The old couch was in love with its new slipcover" (novel), "The old couch was at…

The paper being reviewed puts the vernacular in the perspective of the linguistic repertoire of a speech community. It is suggested that the repertoire as a single system should be seen on a societal or individual level rather than on a linguistic level such that various codes are selected by members of the community according to socially…

This investigation addresses problems of defining verbal imitation, and suggests solutions by analyzing verbal interactions between two children and their mothers. Children were between 18 and 35 months old, with a mean length of utterance between 1.4 and 4.2 morphemes. Analyses focus upon the uses these children made of maternal models; 10…

A study was conducted to examine some of the cognitive and linguistic factors that influence metaphor comprehension in young children. Presupposing that (1) the similarities between the topic and the vehicle in a metaphor comprise the metaphor's ground, (2) salience is the degree of prominence of a characteristic in relation to a concept, and (3)…

Recent research findings that have potential application or are already contributing to the refinement of educational practice in bilingual education include developments in language research, teacher effectiveness research, and ethnography. In language research, these contributions include work on the need for and types of language proficiency,…

Studies in psychology, language, and foreign language suggest that it is the qualitative nature of the task students perform while learning that is important, because of the creativity factor. Some explanations of creativity are concerned with hemisphericity of the brain. Another explanation is that creativity results from divergent rather than…

This study examined input enhancement and second language (L2) vocabulary learning while exploring the role of "distinctiveness," the degree to which an item in the input diverges from the form in which other items in the input are presented, with regard to the nature and direction of the effects of enhancement. In this study,…