Minorities have for some time been underrepresented in the technical fields, such as engineering and computer science. This development is known to be caused by a variety of factors, but the primary purpose of this report is to help identify those factors that adversely affect the cognitive development of the technical bilingual student in terms…

This report summarizes six studies that examined the work of the Swedish Free Writing in School (FRIS) project, which followed the language development of 191 elementary school students from different socioeconomic areas over a three-year period. Following a brief description of the project, the report discusses each of the six studies, which deal…

This is a comparative study of the cognitive, reading, and achievement levels of Italian Americans in bilingual programs and of their monolingual Italian and American peers. Three groups of students age 10 to 13 were matched within and across groups, according to schools, grade level, dialect, and socioeconomic status. Group I was subdivided into…

Recent studies in productive phonology among immigrants have supported the case for the existence of a critical or sensitive period in language acquisition. The present study proposes that the case for a sensitive period would be further strengthened by the discovery of comparable age effects for other linguistic abilities such as listening…

Children's early utterances were studied to determine whether there are developmental changes in the content, context, frequency, and form of their speech and the degree to which the changes correspond to changes in Piagetian cognitive stage. Twenty children were studied; six were 10 or 11 months old, and the remaining 14 were distributed evenly…

Fifty residents of Houston, Texas, were surveyed to determine whether or not factors concerning their background affected their word choice, grammatical usage, and pronunciation. Each informant answered a questionnaire consisting of one page of background data and two pages of questions about his daily speech. In correlating the participants'…

Foreigner talk is the register used by native speakers to make themselves understood by foreigners whose competence in the language is limited. Published studies on foreigner talk have dealt with phonetic variation sparingly and impressionistically. This may be due to the difficulty of imposing experimental constraints on natural linguistic events…

A synchronic structural description is presented of Haitian Creole as spoken in the Port-au-Prince-Jacmel area, concentrating mainly on phonoloqy and morphology. Historical information and commentary are presented on diglossia and illiteracy, two intertwining sociolinguistic problems of Haiti. A detailed analysis is presented of the Creole sound…

Second language reading research based on a psycholinguistic approach was undertaken. A model of the language user derived from the literature on first language acquisition was used. The role of conceptualization on second language reading, including the effects of interference and other factors in the first language, is discussed, and…

A project designed to gather information about similarities and differences that may be important for teaching English to Finnish learners, and, to a certain extent, for teaching Finnish through English, was conducted through a systematic comparison of the two languages and an analysis of instances where the two languages come into contact. In the…

Parallels between processes in society and in language are drawn in this analysis of problems involved in eliminating sexism in language. The paper is organized as follows: varieties of sexism in language are outlined; the linguistic notion of marking is applied to the sexist structures; psychological aspects of such marking are considered;…

The structure of the Noun Phrase (NP) is analyzed in a corpus featuring Tagalog-English code-switching. Instances of first language (L1) NP's appearing as subjects and complements in second language (L2) sentential units are examined to gain insight into code-switching. Ten thirty-minute tapes of a radio program in Tagalog provided the corpus for…

To assist language researchers in their analysis of interlanguage, some values for the linguistic variables of Source Language (SL), Interlanguage (IL), and Target Language (TL) are set forth. Although the fundamental assumption underlying interlanguage research is that interlanguages are linguistic systems, it is difficult to describe the…

A study was undertaken to investigate the nature of the cohesive features found in the language of selected first grade students and to study and compare the cohesive features of language samples in the beginning level of three widely used reading series to those found in the language of the children for whom they are intended. In the first part…

Two tests were administered to 87 students at the third through fifth levels of English as a second language (with emphasis on scientific education) at the Center for the Teaching of Foreign Languages of the Autonomous Metropolitan University. Test I consisted of 25 multiple choice and true/false reading comprehension questions based on a…