This article describes a technique used to monitor the action of the upper front surface of the soft palate during normal speech in French. Results tend to confirm the findings of other instrumental phonetic research, and contradict some theoretical claims of French phonology. (CLK)

Certain aspects of meta-linguistic awareness are known to be essential for bilingual children's literacy acquisition. Phonological awareness is one of these skills. Beginning with a discussion of a pivotal developmental research model of control & analysis of cognitive skills in bilinguals, this review will discuss several studies that explored…

A subset of a Seri-English bilingual dictionary (in preparation) is presented that includes terms referring to people, kinship terms, and verbs closely related to them. This version includes an English-to-Seri dictionary with 61 basic terms and variants, and a Seri dictionary with both Spanish and English glosses. It uses a practical orthography…

It is generally recognized that a positive relationship exists between language ability and mental ability as measured by a standard intelligence test. The relationship has been suspect, however, since the understanding and use of words play so large a part in many of the intelligence tests. The question has been raised of whether a child earns a…

Irrespective of the traditional reconstructions related to the theory of well known families of languages such as Indo-European or Semitic, some researchers have aimed at rebuilding super-families, going as far as a Proto-global family. Several puzzling agreements between their proposals and the reconstructions made by the genetics populations…

A study examined a form of other-initiated repair which occurs later than next turn, a form which is produced by nonnative speakers of English whose native language is Mandarin. Data consists of transcriptions of naturally occurring conversations from 12 native speaker-nonnative speaker (NS-NNS) dyads, friends who ordinarily chat. Conversational…

To determine what psycholinguistic evidence (or external evidence) such as slips of the tongue, monosyllabic word blends, and novel word games reveals about syllable structure, this study focused on psycholinguistic research on the English and German syllable. English and German provide a good testing ground for evaluation of external evidence…

This paper presents some empirical findings on language acquisition and learning, relates them to other research studies on the same topics, and draws some conclusions about the conditions in which optimal language learning occurs. The paper's focus is on the acquisition of vocabulary and grammar. The debate about the role of incidental learning…

The textbook provides an intensive introduction to recent work in syntactic theory within the minimalist framework. The approach taken is to presuppose no background knowledge of syntactic theory or historical linguistics. Rather than compare English with other languages, illustrations are drawn from varieties of English from around the world.…

A study was conducted in 32 families in Chicago, with children ranging from 18 months to 5 years, to examine the role of parents in their young children's language acquisition. Specifically investigated were parents' attitudes on language acquisition, opportunities used to prompt their youngsters to say a new word/utterance, and the utterances…

This book is a concise history of structural linguistics, charting its development from the 1870s to the present day. It explains what structuralism was and why its ideas are still central today. For structuralists, a language is a self-contained and tightly organized system whose history is of changes from one state of the system to another. This…

Ethnographic pedagogy builds a bridge between nontraditional students' home community with the values of the academic community, but the point of "bridging" the two communities seems to be for the student to come over to "our side." This paper proposes an ethnographic pedagogical approach that is reciprocal, bridging both…

Language is a child's major tool for learning about the world. This book presents a naturalistic case study of one child's use of language from two-and-a-half to five years, drawing on systemic functional theory to argue that cognitive development is essentially a linguistic process and offering a new description and interpretation of linguistic…

Using 17, 211 words drawn from the word list compiled for the Stanford Spelling Study (1963) and drawing upon the "American Heritage Dictionary of the American Language" as the pronunciation reference, a researcher approached the language as if little was known about its letter-sound relationships and examined by computer the letter-sound…

This document consists of three issues of DELTA, comprising its entire output for 1998. DELTA is a journal of theoretical and applied linguistics and covers a wide variety of material related to language, speech, and education. The journal publishes only original research and ideas presented in the form of articles, debates, squibs, overviews,…