Discusses three studies which show that the first two of J. Searle's conditions are extremely important to maintain if a promise is to be made or understood. Supports the idea that promises do not by themselves obligate a speaker but are used to reaffirm previously existing, and often unstated, obligations. (NKA)

Describes two types of feedback (explicit and implicit) in the responses of four mothers to their two-year-old children and investigates whether these mothers respond differentiallly to their children's well-formed and ill-formed utterances with either type of feedback. Results demonstrate that a high proportion of maternal responses qualify as…

Discusses the L1=L2 hypothesis which states that, all other things except knowledge of language being equal, first language acquisition is the same as second language acquisition. Reviews the evidence for and against the hypothesis, looks at current research and considers the general distinction between formal and informal learning. (SED)

Describes three experiments that show that when requesting information, speakers estimate the greatest potential obstacles to compliance and try to overcome them through their choice of indirect, or conditional, requests. In selecting their request, speakers in most situations try to pinpoint the obstacles as specifically as they can. (SED)

Describes research into the correspondence between speech and sign language by looking at simultaneous communication as it is used by fluent deaf persons. The study aims to determine what relationship, if any, exists between the morpheme level and the message level of utterances in discourse. (SED)

Presents the results of a one-year longitudinal analysis of the interlanguage of an adult acquiring English without formal instruction. Observations of the form-function relationships in the early interlanguage are included as well as the ways these relationships change over the 12 months of the study. (SL)

Presents the results of an investigation into how native speakers of English provide corrective feedback to errors in conversation with their nonnative speaker friends. Native speakers responded to errors by using either on-record or off-record corrective feedback and several noncorrective discourse devices to repair conversational difficulties.…

Analyzes language teaching and learning as it transpires during the course of verbal interaction in the home. (DF)

Examines the lexical and syntactic development of a bilingual child and the cognitive developments that coincided with the child's linguistic processes. Concludes that it is the development of self-awareness and sensitivity to standards in the second year which provides the motive for the child to avoid mixed-language utterances. (SED)

Reports on a study of judges' strategies in clarifying their verbal explanations of constitutional rights to criminal defendants. Identifies six clarification processes and compares them with other studies of clarification processes and with the properties of simplified registers, particularly speech addressed to first- and second-language…

Examines classroom language learning from the perspective of research and teaching. Looks at the classroom as a special social situation; identifies eight features of the classroom as culture and applies them to the language class. Argues that the classroom has its own communicative potential for language learning. (SED)

Research is reported which investigated the ability of four-month-old hearing infants to discriminate between gestures derived from American Sign Language. Findings show that infants possess the perceptual abilities to differentiate between signs that differ solely in terms of contrasts along a single underlying movement direction. (SED)

Examines the nonstandard constructions in Caipira Portuguese, a dialect spoken in southeastern Brazil, which illustrate a tendency to reduce morphological redundancy at the noun phrase level. This is accomplished by restricting plural markers to only one of the elements of the noun phrase--not the noun, as might be expected, but, rather, one its…

Discusses the production of anomalous sentences by non-native students of the Japanese language and suggests that the primary cause of various errors indicated in such sentences is the confusion with English "when." In addition, it is suggested that error analysis can help clarify the nature of grammatical problems and facilitate learning of…

Reports three studies which explored relationships between prototypicality and sentence structure in recall, preference ratings, and natural dictionary definitions. The results can be explained in terms of the sensitivity of sentence production processes to the lexical or conceptual accessibility of prototypes. (Author/AMH)