The analysis of syllable and pause durations in speech production can provide information about the properties of a speaker's grammatical code. Seven experiments analyzed syllable and pause durations in structurally ambiguous sentences. Results showed that a single hierarchial principle provided a unified account of speech timing effects for…

Takes an in-depth look at the probabilistic nature of human communication, i.e, the misinterpretation of the language-producer message by the language comprehender. Reviews the psycho-linguistic, linguistic and philosophical literature dealing with this aspect of language and demonstrates that this misinterpretation is related to a basic process…

Titles of completed dissertations and those in preparation dealing with hispanic languages and literature are listed. This is useful to professors and graduate students to give them the opportunity to gain an overview of the literary currents, genres, themes and authors. (NCR)

A study was conducted at Nanyang University in Singapore with Chinese-educated students who supposedly received 12 years of instruction in English but who were still deficient in the language. Comprehension of four different English accents were tested, and two tests of measuring aural comprehension were compared. (SW)

Twentieth century studies in the field of Sino-Vietnamese linguistics, with particular emphasis on work since 1955, are examined and evaluated. The discussions focus on how the studies were developed, what the current state is, and where problems are. A bibliography of works mentioned in the main text is included. (Author/SW)

Adults and 4-year-old children were tested to determine whether the children were able to decode sets of familiar minimal pairs as well as adults. They listened to words spoken in a normal voice and a whisper. Indications were that the 4-year-old's perceptual mastery of English phonology is not yet complete. (SW)

An analysis of the causative verb construction in French as studied by Harris. Some questions raised are: Can a causative verb be considered an auxiliary? Which verbs can be causative? Might the notion of auxiliary include "auxiliary nouns"? Syntactic and lexical-semantic distinctions are made. (Text is in French.) (AMH)

Discusses an investigation of dimensions of development in speaking and writing between the ages of eight and twelve, focusing on both cognitive and affective processes. (AA)

In these studies, people recalled additional, previously unrecalled information from stories following instruction to take a new perspective. The data clearly show the operation of retrieval processes independent from encoding processes. (SW)

Three groups of children, aged 5, 7, and 11 years, were tested in a clause-memory task, in order to investigate the role of syntactic and semantic factors in children's recall and processing of spoken continuous prose. (Author/SW)

Factors responsible for recent interest in Chinese linguistics include encouragement of research in linguistics by the Chinese Academy of Sciences since 1950 and Communist Party support for linguistics. Stresses the need to unite linguistics theory and practice. (Author/DB)

Presents background information on Chinese writing, discusses its defects, suggests how to develop Chinese writing, and offers opinions about research in Chinese writing. (Author/DB)

Recommends that linguists follow Communist Party leadership as they investigate and criticize Chinese language reform. Linguistics based upon bourgeois thought does not take into consideration the viewpoint of the masses. (Author/DB)

This article reports on a statistical study on the frequency of occurrence of different connectors between simple sentences as seen in texts written by elementary school children, as a function of parent education and occupation, social class and dwelling area of the child. (Text is in French.) (CDSH/CLK)

Aspects of the processing of frequency information were investigated in two studies. The first showed that second graders were as prepared to process frequency differences as adults. The second showed that practice at frequency counting does not improve the performance of young adults and neither does feedback regarding earlier performance.…