THIS VOLUME PRESENTS THE LINGUISTIC MATERIAL ASSEMBLED BY THE AUTHORS (MUCH OF IT AT FIRST HAND) IN THE COURSE OF THEIR CLASSIFICATION OF THE NON-BANTU LANGUAGES OF NORTHEASTERN AFRICA. THIS MATERIAL, DEALING MAINLY WITH MORPHEMES AND GRAMMATICAL AND SYNTACTIC BEHAVIOR, INCLUDES DESCRIPTIONS OF THE FOLLOWING LANGUAGES--MORU-MANGBETU,…

THIS RESEARCH EXAMINED THE WAYS SUBJECTS USE SUCH A STRUCTURAL DEVICE AS GRAMMAR IN THEIR ATTEMPTS TO RECALL OR PRODUCE BEHAVIOR SEQUENCES IN LANGUAGE INSTRUCTION. RESEARCH TECHNIQUES TO STUDY THE BEHAVIORAL CORRELATES OF THE UTILIZATION OF RULES IN THE GENERATION OF LANGUAGE BEHAVIOR WERE DEVELOPED. THESE TECHNIQUES WERE THEN USED TO STUDY THE…

THIS INSTRUCTIONAL MANUAL WAS PREPARED FOR A COMPUTER-BASED SPEECH TRAINING SYSTEM, DESIGNED TO CONDITION FLUENCY IN THE PROSODIC FEATURES OF SPEECH. THE SCOPE OF THE MANUAL COVERED (1) SYSTEM AND SUBSYSTEM SPECIFICATIONS, (2) SYSTEM AND PROGRAM OPERATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS, AND (3) BASIC INFORMATION ON THE CONTROL OF SPEECH PRODUCTION AND…

TESTS TO DETERMINE SPOKEN EQUIVALENTS OF ENGLISH CONCEPTS USED IN INTERVIEWS WITH FRANCO-AMERICANS OF FRENCH-CANADIAN DESCENT ARE PRESENTED. THEY INCLUDE A PRELIMINARY CLASSIFICATION TEST, A VOCABULARY TEST, AND A PHONETICS TEST. THE INTERVIEWS WERE DESIGNED TO ILLUSTRATE THE CHIEF FEATURES OF THE FRENCH SPOKEN BY NEW ENGLAND FRANCO-AMERICANS AND…

This report on research in progress explores criteria for lexical innovation in children. Children, like adults, make use of a principle of conventionality (each word has one or more conventional meanings) and one of contrast (the conventional meanings of every two words contrast). Like adults, children coin words to fill lexical gaps, and they do…

The focus of this research is to determine how soon and to what extent infant abilities are influenced by listening experience. Fourteen English-learning infants and fourteen Spanish-learning 6-8 month old infants participated in a first experiment; eight additional English and Spanish-learning infants participated in a second experiment. Infants…

Readers cannot profitably be studied without some assessment of the texts they read. Analyses of texts, however, are of doubtful value unless tested against readers' behavior. Despite the relative neglect of text in research on reading, numerous approaches to the analysis of text have been proposed. The developments within linguistics and the…

A conference of African scholars was held in the United States in 1979 to develop a consensus and a statement about the direction that African language teaching and learning should take in this decade. African languages are among the so-called "less-commonly taught languages," and funding for their teaching and study has come from…

Children in kindergarten and grades 2, 4, and 7, and a group of adults were asked to choose, from a series of paired pictures, which of each pair represented the situation described in a statement that contained an ambiguous negation. In all five sentence types represented, there was a gradual progression toward adult performance, but…

A study is described in which the acquisition of "in,""on," and "under" was studied controlling for the non-linguistic strategies suggested by Clark's (1974) ordered rules, as well as controlling for stimuli bias. Clark's rules were: (1) If Y is a container, put X "in" it; and if Y is not a container, but…

This is an investigation of the phonological units used by preschool children. Twenty-four English-speaking children aged 4;0 to 5;0 were given three experimental tasks which investigated their ability to segment initial consonant clusters into phoneme-length units: (1) in a segmentation task they gave the first sound of initial cluster words; (2)…

A remarkable aspect of the present-day American linguistic and intellectual scene is the fact that public attitudes about language reflect neither scholarly efforts in the field of linguistics nor the intellectual spirit of the twentieth century in general. Prescriptive, absolutist linguistic attitudes on the part of intelligent, educated people…

This paper is directed toward a traditional problem in the analysis of texts, that of finding meaningful linguistic units that are larger than a sentence and smaller than the text itself. Two principles are given for finding extended temporal structures based on the temporal expressions that occur in sentences: a sentence can be captured to form…

Some psychologically salient meaning properties of lexical items were isolated using judgments about the similarity of meaning within three sets of words: verbs of judging, hypothetical verbs, and locative prepositions. Subjects were asked to rate the similarity of meaning of all possible pairs of words from one of the three domains on a 1-9…

IN THE FIRST PART OF THIS STUDY, A SET OF MEANINGLESS SENTENCES USING ONLY THE SYLLABLE "PA" BUT IMITATING THE INTONATIONAL CONTOUR OF THE SENTENCE "IL VIENDRA ME VOIR DEMAIN MATIN A SEPT HEURES" WERE USED TO PROVIDE SYLLABLES TO BUILD UP 12 SEMI-ARTIFICIAL NONSENSE WORDS. THIRTY-TWO NATIVE SPEAKERS WERE REQUESTED TO (1) SAY WHICH WAS THE ACCENTED…