Many researchers have assumed that adult bilinguals have separate systems for their two languages. Such an assumption raises interesting questions about how the two languages are acquired in the case of a child learning two languages simultaneously. This study attempts to determine whether the two languages are acquired separately right from the…

The purpose of this paper is to examine the status of deictic reference in the speech of 19 three-year-old Black children. The deictic verbs of motion are examined with reference to other aspects of the deictic system. The data for this study are approximately eight hours of spontaneous speech collected in a pre-school classroom. The hypothesis to…

This paper discusses the background of the language situation in Guam, comparing the findings of a 1966 survey to the present situation. Apparent changes both in the language situation and in attitudes towards language and some of the causative factors involved in the changes are discussed. The study currently underway, which utilizes informal…

This paper challenges from a practical point of view the idea that the phonemic principle is the most adequate or the optimal theoretical basis for devising a romanized alphabet for a language. In the past, romanization of languages, written or unwritten, have largely been based on the phonemic principle and have unnecessarily burdened the learner…

This longitudinal study explored the effects of early language stimulation upon norms of the language development of three infants. When the infants were 4-5 months old, a long-term program of intensified early language stimulation was implemented by weekly home tutoring sessions with the parents. The tutor stimulation program consisted of an…

To write well is not a singular ability; it utilizes critical thinking, creativity, and a feeling for language. An examination of a number of pieces of writing by elementary school pupils shows that some are highly imaginative while others are informative reports, simple statements of events, colorful descriptions, or various forms of poetry.…

A structured elicitation technique, convergent communication, was investigated as a means of constraining the range of linguistic data from children in K-3 without unduly constraining the naturalness of the conversation context. The convergent communication situation is a two-person problem-solving task which ensures that all communication is…

The study summarized in this paper deals with the grammatical analysis of the spontaneous speech of approximately 150 children who are classified as mentally disabled; educable (I.Q. range 50-80). The performance of these mentally disadvantaged children is compared with the performance of 200 normally developing children by using a clinical…

This paper presents a comprehensive, annotated guide to bibliographic materials related to bilingualism, with a particular focus on Spanish-English bilingualism. It is written in Spanish, to meet the needs of the student of language and literature who approaches the study of bilingualism with little prior contact with the research and literature…

This paper reports on the Arkansas Language Survey, which had two purposes: (1) to explore the idea advanced by Labov that Americans generally have negative attitudes about their language, and to see to what extent this applies to Arkansawyers; and (2) to determine how Arkansawyers judge the way other Americans speak English. The twenty-four white…

This paper is a report of two studies of the relationship between intonation and syntax. An analysis of intonation was used to decide whether the pivot-like two-morpheme constructions of a one- and one-half-year-old girl were single lexical items or two separate lexical items. Further, the intonation contours connected with her linguistically…

A study was conducted to determine the efficacy of utilizing Leach's interrogation model as a means for analyzing question types used by mothers and their children's responses to various interrogative forms. Data analyzed consisted of language samples obtained from three preschool children and their mothers during mother-child interactions plus…

Two experiments were carried out to see what parts of a sentence are best retained, whether those parts retained best immediately after acquisition are also remembered best after a 48 hour retention interval, and whether or not the parts of a sentence which are retained depend on the semantic and syntactic structure of that sentence. In the first…

The purpose of this research was to assess the validity of recent claims that experimenter-provided pictures facilitate young children's oral prose learning. The major question of interest was whether the pictures do nothing more than prompt the child to process the just presented information one more time, Three experiments were designed to test…

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the nature and frequency of speech in two classrooms of New York City kindergartners. Specifically, study of the 52 ethnically and socioeconomically varied youngsters attempted to discover whether: (1) more language was used in some activities than in others, (2) more mature speech was used in some…