This study investigates the onset at periodic intervals in the age range of about two to five years of various kinds of recurrent and systematic errors in word choice and/or syntactic structure. Acquisitional processes and their implications are outlined. Sections address: (1) the kinds of processes that can be inferred to underlie errors…

Before the white invasion, Native American peoples possessed an extremely rich and varied heritage with highly developed oral literatures, and constant development of new phrases, expressions, and patterns of pronunciation. Examples of Indian people's adeptness with language include: many learned to speak more than two languages fluently;…

The community should be seen as an essential focus for communication study since it (1) illustrates and tests the instrumental nature of human communication, (2) illustrates the delicate interplay of private and public communication, and (3) provides a unique context in which all human interactive units exert communication influence…

Children's ability to infer dominant or subordinate status of speakers from their requests was investigated. It was hypothesized that, for young children, syntactic indirectness, semantic softness, and a positive tone, in the absence of other cues, would serve as cues to indicate that a speaker is subordinate to a listener. Syntactic directness,…

The papers included in this collection represent as closely as possible the content and organization of the oral presentations delivered at a March 1980 conference on the use of readability formulas. The papers discuss the following topics: (1) an introduction to the conference, with general remarks on the uses and criticism of readability…

As part of a research project studying ways in which police "culture" is socially constructed and displayed in police talk, six members of a research team rode on patrol with officers of a small community police department, during all three shifts, for a period of four months. Conversations during the rides were recorded. Analysis of the…

The standard dictionary definition of a metaphor--a word or phrase applied to an object or concept that it does not literally denote in order to suggest comparison with another object or concept--is inadequate in that it does not deal with whole sentence metaphors and that it provides no way of distinguishing between a metaphor and a semantic…

Research on how communicating human beings produce and understand language has focused mostly on what language is, less on how language is processed, and little on who produces and understands language. However, the interaction between what, who, and how is very significant. The importance of who does languaging is related both to the cognitive…

Finnish visual verbs and the corresponding terms in English are examined to reveal similarities and dissimilarities in the two semantic fields on the basis of translation equivalence. The contrastive analysis describes how the vocabularies of two genetically unrelated languages interpret the visual activity of seeing and looking, and what kind of…

In a study of people's responses to the allegedly sex-neutral terms "man,""mankind,""human being,""person," and "individual," 43 11-year-old boys and girls and 127 young men and women were asked to read sentences containing the terms and assign referents for each sentence. Referents were assigned by choosing from a group of pictorial symbols…

Thirty-two Hawaiian children in grades two, four, and seven participated in a study designed to test an ethnographic observation that rural Hawaiian children are highly sensitive to movement and location in their visual environment, and also to test the effect on the children of using Pidgin versus Standard English (S.E.). The children were…