The 17-month (1967-1968) study summarized in this report concerned experimental analysis of the verbal behavior of disadvantaged preschool children (an interracial group of 28, ranging in age from 30 months to 42 months). Research was conducted in the verbal behavior laboratory at the University of Rochester and in a remodeled private home in a…

This study investigated semantic aspects of children's language as it is related to emotional expression. Children's ratings of vocabulary items categorized as expressing happy, sad, loving, angry, confident, and scared feelings were examined in three different ways: in isolation, in verbal contexts, and accompanying pictures of emotional…

In order to establish whether voice pitch and evaluative meaning play any significant role in affecting message learning (as demonstrated by listeners' recall) at the morphemic level of communication, 48 freshman students in a basic speech program participated in this study. Through individual headsets, students listened to tapes containing an…

Research in bilingualism has shown that the balance between a bilingual's two languages is rarely even and that there is something special about the mother tongue. Theories concerning separate storage of the two languages and first language primacy predict that: (1) the meanings of translation-equivalent words are not identical, and (2) the…

Cape Barren English is clearly the most aberrant dialect of English spoken in Australia. Descended from English sealers, whalers and ex-convicts and their Aboriginal wives, the inhabitants of Cape Barren Island, Tasmania, have lived in relative isolation for the last 150 years or more. Their dialect is not a creolized pidgin; it has a number of…

This paper deals with the counterexamples to the general principles that: (1) a sentence as utterance has only one illocutionary force, in the sense of J.L. Austin; and (2) performative verbs do not normally retain illocutionary force in embedded contexts. Various tests for illocutionary force are applied, such as substitution of another speech…

The purpose of this study was to analyze and compare the oral reading strategies of average and below-average readers in grades four, five, and six who were speakers of Hawaiian Islands dialect. Fifty subjects from Keaukaha School on the island of Hawaii composed the sample group. Subjects were selected on the basis of their standardized test…

This article re-examines the role of the pronounceability of visually presented materials, following the idea that intergration on the vocal-auditory level may result from letter combinations that are easy to pronounce. (CLK)

This article discusses the ordering of semantic units such as nouns and verbs in Chinese sentences, with references to problems encountered by students of Chinese. (CLK)

Functional and linguistic aspects of the speech of Dutch-speaking mothers from three social classes to their two-year-old children were studied to test the hypothesis that simplified speech is crucial to language acquisition. Available from Plenum Publishing Corp., 227 W. 17th St., New York, NY 10011. (Author/RM)

Spelling patterns in English and their underlying unity are described. A direction for research in the area of Anglo-Saxon and Old English words in present-day English is suggested. (RM)

Based on Mulder's previous classification of all semiotic systems designed to describe the system of discrete features in human languages, this article explores a further subclassification of the genus language into species. (CLK)

The properties of four different tests of the treatment effect in experiments using linguistic materials are examined. (Author/RM)

A study is reported describing an output-monitoring phenomenon in free recall and establishing that subjects have accurate knowledge concerning their previous output performance. Implications with respect to other known memory phenomena are discussed. (Author/RM)

A study is described which examined the retrieval of regular and irregular past tense verbs. Results suggested that preterites such as "taught" are not stored as separate and independent lexical units but are formed from the verb stem by means of derivational rules. (Author/RM)