The categorizations which humans make of the concrete world are not arbitrary but highly determined. In taxonomies of concrete objects, there is one level of abstraction at which the most basic category cuts are made. Basic categories are those which carry the most information, possess the highest category cue validity, and are, thus, the most…

In an integration of listening research with other areas of language arts, this monograph presents a framework for understanding listening skills and outlines classroom activities that are based on scientific data. Stressing the priority and value of listening instruction, the introduction discusses the need for more attention to listening and…

A study on sentence processing involving rehearsal, response initiation, and mental transformation required the subject to perform a secondary task concurrently with transformation of a sentence previously given. A secondary task interruption technique was used to allow inferences as to where the planning occurs by measuring increases in task time…

The report summarizes a 1976 conference designed to analyze the findings and recommendations of three studies of language development in young handicapped children. It is explained that project directors and language researchers attended the Bureau of Education for the Handicapped - sponsored conference. A summary of conference discussion is…

THIS REPORT DISCUSSES HOW NOUNS AND THEIR ADJUNCTIVES ARE USED IN MANDARIN SENTENCES IN DENOTING THE RELATION BETWEEN SETS AND THEIR SUBSETS. LANGUAGE HAS SOME MEANS OF SPECIFYING SETS OF OBJECTS, ACTIONS, OR ABSTRACT UNITS IN VARIOUS WAYS, IN ORDER TO HAVE SUCCESSFUL COMMUNICATION. LANGUAGE DOES NOT BEAR THE ENTIRE BURDEN OF SPECIFYING A CERTAIN…

THIS DOCUMENT REPORTS THE PROGRESS FROM SEPTEMBER 1, 1961 TO FEBRUARY 1, 1962 OF AN EXPERIMENTAL PROGRAM IN SPEECH CONTROL. THE TOPICS DISCUSSED ARE--(1) PARAMETERS OF VOWEL PERCEPTION, (2) RELATIONS AMONG RESPONSE RATE, TOPOGRAPHY, AND SCHEDULES OF REINFORCEMENT--METHODS AND FINDINGS IN AN ANALYSIS OF THE VOCAL OPERANT, (3) FOREIGN ACCENT AND…

A 15-minute interview was conducted separately with 2 5th grade boys (1 Caucasian, 1 Negro) who were matched on IQ and 4 pupil characteristics; home background, personality, social behavior, and academic ability. A semantic differential scale was constructed for the 4 characteristics, and 5 disability labels were assigned to each child:…

Three research projects conducted by three major televised FLES programs attempted to assess the effect of follow-up activities by the classroom teacher. The programs involved in the projects were "Parlons Francais," the University of Illinois Foreign Language Instruction Project (Spanish), and the Denver-Stanford Project on the Context…

This paper deals with two experiments whose purposes are to investigate the linguistic competence of young children and their receptivity to adult speech. In the free response experiment, imperative sentences were presented to 1 1/2- to 2 1/2-year-olds. The sentences were minimal (a single noun), telegraphic, or full adult sentences. The youngest…

This paper is a response to Lavandera's question regarding the limits of the study of language variation. Sociolinguistics is characterized by its desire to limit representational meaning much more narrowly than formal linguistics. In addition while formal linguistics views language as species-specific and designed to accomodate logical…

Researchers examined the first in-class essays and the final exam essays of 24 freshman writing students to determine the syntactic maturity these students gained during an eight-month period. Counting the words, T-units, clauses, and sentences for each of the 48 essays created data about mean words per T-unit, clauses per T-unit, words per…

Research studies have demonstrated that children tend to define nouns by describing first their function and later the object to which they refer. In a study devised to trace the development of noun definition in the language of grade school children and adults, 20 subjects from each of four grade levels (kindergarten and grades two, four, and…

The first half of this document reports on research that explores the ways in which knowledge of the world affects judgments of sentence acceptability. Sixty children in grades four through eight were studied at two times, one year apart. The subjects were first interviewed regarding their knowledge of the world in order to identify their role…

This is the fourth and final report in a series dealing with the impact of the modes of discourse (description, narration, exposition, and argumentation) on written syntactic complexity at the elementary school level. The first three reports dealt in turn with the three grade levels involved in the study (third, fourth, and fifth grades). This…

It is a generally held view that Korean lacks articles and that the category "number" in this language is unproductive. That is, the nouns in Korean can be used freely as definite and indefinite, and as singular and plural, without overt grammatical markers. Contrary to this view, the claim is made in this paper that non-unique nouns,…