Reported here is the work of two linguists, William Labov and Paul Cohen, and of two black researchers who know the culture of the inner city, Clarence Robins and John Lewis. Together they explore certain aspects of Black English vernacular (BEV) and certain political and cultural aspects of the black community. Part 1 (chapters 1-4) deals with…

A project currently being conducted in Sweden on free written composition at the middle level of comprehensive school is described. The principal aims of the project are listed under three headings: linguistic quality and linguistic development, stimulus measures preparatory to writing, and social differences in writing ability. Included in the…

The Uniform Slavic Transliteration Alphabet (USTA) was designed primarily with the following objectives: to aid librarians (catalogers and bibliographers), information scientists, transliterators, and editors of bibliographic works of the many Slavic tongues; and to serve as original research for the further development of a machine-readable…

Active and passive sentences were presented with probable and improbable semantic content to 100 first graders and 100 kindergartners. "Irreversible" sentences were considered improbable. In a design employing syntax, probability, grade, and sex as factors, probability and syntax were found significant both as main effects and in their…

The purpose of these studies was to test the hypothesis that thematization affects the probability that a probe word will produce meaning-preserving recall of a sentence that is part of a discourse. Sentences were constructed along the lines of subject-verb-object and were presented in three experiments: free recall of isolated sentences, prompted…

This study compares oral language production with the written realization of this production for a group of white and a group of Negro second graders attending public schools in Austin and San Antonio, Texas, respectively. Oral language production was assessed using the Gloria and David Oral English test, an individually administered audiovisual…

The basic purpose of this study was to establish association values for nonsense words to be used in learning experiments with children from culturally-different backgrounds. Responses to 50 stimuli (44 nonsense and six real words) individually administered to 164 children from kindergarten, day care, and nursery school settings, representing two…

An overview of research on implicit speech from 1868 to 1970 is presented. Various studies are reviewed in which a variety of mechanical devices were used to examine the physiological changes that occur during silent reading. Edfelt's use of a mingograph in 1950 was considered a breakthrough, along with his conclusion that efforts to eliminate…

Since the early sixties, the need has existed for linguistic description of the language of the inner city. This dissertation was written to meet this need. Data were collected over a period of two years using the field methods of anthropological linguistics as adapted to an urban situation. Analysis in terms of the data yields a description that…

In an analysis of the research literature on specific teacher behaviors which focused on oral language or speaking, no studies were found which could meet fully the criteria proposed for inclusion. Sources of problems lay in (1) the absence of an explicit theory of language underlying the study or series of propositions; (2) the failure to get…

This study attempted to explore the possibility of increasing sensitivity to syntactic structure by exposing subjects representing a range of ability to a programed sentence structure module. Students in three ninth grade classes who had completed four weeks of supplementary work with "English Sentence Structure: Programed Exercises" and scored 70…

This paper considers five possible analyses to explain dental alternations in Japanese and argues that the formulation approximating the actual historical development is likely to provide the most satisfactory synchronic description. The approaches considered are distributional analysis, strict historical interpretation, modified historical…

It has been generally understood that Japanese has two grammatical tenses, past and non-past. However, there are statements about future events which use the "past tense." Furthermore, for certain verbs, the "past tense" is not confined to describing strictly a past event. This paper seeks to clarify the meaning of tense in Japanese and to show…

In keeping with the objective of the Navajo Reading Study, to investigate the feasibility and effect of teaching Navajo children to read their own language first, it was decided that more needs to be known about Navajo children and the language they know. Thus, between October 1969 and June 1970, 22 adult Navajo interviewers recorded free…

The development of a computerized system of word analysis in order to compare and compile word lists is outlined. It is suggested that a computerized system would be an efficient way of comparing word lists for such elements as content (according to criteria of range, scope, and form of words), obsolescence, levels of difficulty, number of words,…