Analysis of the communicative skills of a nine-year-old deaf boy with minimal schooling showed pantomiming and gestures to be his major mode of communication. Certain semantic patterns prevailed. Use of left or right hand also had semantic correlates. Formal and idiosynacratic signs were discovered in the boy's vocabulary. (Author/PJM)

Reports on one of a series of sociolinguistic studies of the speech of children of foreign workers in Berlin, "Gastarbeiterdeutsch," addressing the question of potential creolization. The paper has three sections: (1) a social and linguistic background of "Gastarbeiterdeutsch"; (2) the study methodology; and (3) results of the…

Two hypotheses were tested about how young children (four-to seven-year-olds) answer questions with the quantifiers "all" and "some": (1) that children use syntactic cues in determining which noun phrase is quantified, and (2) that children evaluate a some-statement as part of evaluating an all-statement. (Author/MP)

The article describes the Diagnostic Evaluation of Writing Skills (DEWS), a diagnostic teaching tool containing criteria of assessment to determine a student's deficiencies in reading and writing. (DLS)

Analyses the syntactical, semantic, and stylistic characteristics of English passive constructions and stresses the frequency of their occurrence in scientific and technical English. Recommends that for adequate mastery of this special purpose dialect, teachers make students consciously aware of these grammatical structures and of their usage.…

The article examines normal language and communication development to provide insights into what parents of hearing impaired children can expect from and do for their children. Findings of particular importance for facilitating linguistic growth in hearing impaired children are discussed. (DLS)

Compares two language intervention methods on effectiveness at improving syntactic structures of language-delayed preschool children. The interactive approach optimized syntax improvement for children with high pretraining scores, whereas the programed approach resulted in superior syntax performance for low-scoring children. (Author/BK)

Explores the role of negative marking in the mapping of the semantic and syntactic structures of Taiwanese modals on to their surface structure in terms of syntactic transformations. Particular attention is paid to the process of lexical fusion as it occurs in such negative forms as "be" and "m." (Author/PJM)

Analyzes in detail the expressions used by 39 grade school children explaining--in writing--the rules of a ball game. The analysis focuses on the linguistic strategies employed to define the actors and the actions of the game and establishes correlations between these strategies and the sociocultural background of the writers. (MES)

Describes an experiment designed to determine the effect of missing syntactic cues on listeners' comprehension of grammatical sentences heard through noise. Comparison between sentences containing function word deletions and sentences with a more clearly displayed syntactic structure suggests that deletion of minor cues hinders comprehension under…

Gives a syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, and discourse structure analysis of mothers' speech to children of 1;0, 1;8, 2;3, and 5;0 years, showing that the age of the child to whom mothers were speaking could be predicted very accurately from her speech. The changes in mothers' speech are responses to concurrent changes in children's language…

A study was conducted to investigate the possibility of improving reading comprehension by training sentence organization skills using a sentence anagram task and word-grouping strategy. Results indicated that training significantly improved sentence anagram performance and transferred to reading comprehension performance. (MKM)

Reports on a study of the use of sentence combining in developmental writing classes. (MKM)

This concluding article in a series concerning the use of the comma in Spanish gives specific examples of its use from Spanish literature. Concluding remarks outline the major purposes of the comma. (NCR)

The study involving 46 learning disabled children (mean age eight years) was designed to determine the effects of training in paradigmatic language structures on the reading process of Ss. Findings lent support for the semantic and syntactic relativity of words and for the meaning inherent in the nucleus of key verbal elements linking ideas to one…