A theoretical explanation of the phenomenon of recognition failure and a presentation of seven experiments investigating performance. Recognition failure is reduced when a more stringent recognition criterion is used, essentially eliminated when the proper access test is used and significantly reduced when variability in recognition performance is…

A presentation of evidence gathered in a study of a dying dialect of Scottish Gaelic that reduction in structure accompanies reduction in use. Recognition of distortion through unavoidable reliance on semi-speaker informants seems possible on the basis of internal or external evidence. More study is needed on the semi-speaker phenomenon. (AMH)

A description of field research which attributes the declining use of Breton to the conflict of status roles when primary socialization is in Breton and secondary socialization is in French. The growing impact of French civilization leads to increasing primary socialization in French. Notes, a questionnaire and references are included. (AMH)

Traces the evolution of thought in the field of psycholinguistics ("theory of verbal activity" in Russia) and discusses current research being done in the United States, Europe, and the Soviet Union. A valid method of teaching language cannot be developed without a theory of language acquisition. (Text is in Italian.) (CFM)

The simultaneous acquisition of Italian and English by a child living in Italy, the son of an American mother and Italian father, is discussed by his mother. In particular, the development of his vocabulary is analyzed. (Text is in Italian.) (CFM)

Evaluates various explanations for the fact that Chinese writing has remained at the ideographic stage for several thousand years. Reasons include dialect differences, social and political unrest, and attempts by the ruling class and men of letters to preserve complex character writing as an indication of class superiority. (Author/DB)

A model is proposed in which information processing is accompanied by dynamic processes, including the reorganization of items into active patterns and their subsequent displacement. Research using category names and instances showed that reaction times decreased with each successive repetition under one condition, but longer latencies were…

This study examines the processes whereby new information is integrated with generalized world knowledge. (Author/RM)

A spectrographic investigation was carried out on the speech of normal hearing and deaf speakers; the research attempted to answer questions concerning formant transitions, coarticulation and neutralization of vowels in the speech of the deaf adults. (Author/RM)

This monograph presents a descriptive analysis of the syntactic patterns in 16 corpora of word combinations from 11 infants learning either English (six children), Samoan, Finnish, Hebrew, or Swedish. The mean utterance lengths range up to about 1.7 morpehmes. There are both reanalyses of corpora in the literature and new corpora. The data…

Data on the acquisition of lexical tone were collected from 17 Mandarin-speaking children. Among other results, it was found that: (1) tone is acquired relatively quickly; (2) mastery of tones occurs well before mastery of segmentals; and (3) Mandarin high-level and falling tones are acquired before rising and dipping tones. (Author/RM)

In four studies, 60 two- and three-year-olds were studied in an elicited imitation task wherein the linguistic form of sentences was varied according to conjunction structure and pattern of redundancy deletion in conjunction reduction. Both factors were found to affect imitation. (Author/RM)

Two studies were conducted to discover possible patterns in question acquisition. For the production study, questions were collected from 22 children aged two to eleven. In the comprehension study, 100 children, aged three to five, were tested. The test controlled syntax and vocabulary and varied specific "wh-" question-words. (Author/RM)

Speech samples were elicited by means of the Bilingual Syntax Measure from eleven children ages 27-48 months, covering a wide span of linguistic development. Presence or absence of eleven functors was scored in obligatory occasions and an acquisition sequence determined using three methods of speech analysis. (CHK)

This paper reports eight experiments with elementary school children and college students concerning the form class effect. Results confirmed several predictions regarding the effects on recall of enhanced organization between pairs of nouns by verb connectives versus conjunction connectives. (Author/JMB)