Examines the rhymes and linguistic tricks used by children, focusing on the rhyme, syllable structure, word boundaries, rhythm, meaning, and social uses of school children's poetry and rhymes. Examples are provided of various past and current poems and rhymes. (Contains 10 references.) (MDM)

Examines the distinctive dialect of the British royal family, as well as the "advanced" Received Pronunciation (RP) of the British upper class. Particular focus is on usages, such as the royal "we" and "one," as well as intergenerational differences among RP speakers. (Contains 21 references.) (MDM)

Compares the performance of poor readers with that of matched good readers and younger average readers. Found that all poor readers performed poorly in all three linguistic areas concurrently, and these difficulties persisted; poor readers demonstrated a difference between their phonological processing skills and their semantic/syntactic skills;…

Describes a word game developed by a sixth-grade teacher that has groups of students "bid on" and "buy" words, with the object of forming as many grammatically correct sentences as possible. Points are awarded based on sentence length, correct punctuation, and sentence type (simple, complex, or compound). (MDM)

This article argues that knowledge of the historical background of a language can be profitably integrated into its teaching at the elementary and intermediate levels. The use of diachronic linguistics is illustrated in the teaching of first-year college French, with specific applications based on pronunciation, vocabulary, morphology, and syntax.…

Reviews "The Transition from Infancy to Language: Acquiring the Power of Expression" (L. Bloom). Underscores that Bloom's account of word learning represents an ethnographic, theoretic, and research approach that explores development by starting with the child, and looks at the many behaviors of the child and views these in relation to…

In a discussion of grammatical identity of a Chinese word, the following topics are covered: word identification, word constituents, word properties, intraword structures, and interword constraints. (20 references) (LB)

The validity of mean length of utterance (MLU) and a measure of syntactic complexity were tested against the language assessment, remediation, and screening procedure on spontaneous speech samples from 87 children, concluding that MLU is a valid measure of clausal complexity up to 4:5 and that the measure of syntactic complexity is more valid at…

Provides an overview of Circuit II, an interactive system that provides users with a graphical representation of an electronic circuit within which questions may be posed and manipulated, and discusses how mouse selections have analogous roles to certain natural language features, such as anaphora, deixis, and ellipsis. (13 references) (EA)

Using a qualitative discourse-analytic framework, this paper compares the planned spoken English of a native speaker of Chinese, whose English discourse was perceived to be hard to follow, with a native speaker of U.S. English. Differences in the use of lexical discourse markers, lexical specificity, and syntactic incorporation are discussed. (34…

Discusses the use of document outlines to reduce navigation problems in hypertext. Measures of syntactic and lexical balance in an outline are proposed, and the degree to which these balances occur in a sample of documents is shown. Based on balance in an outline, a method for semiautomatically generating an outline is applied to a textbook. (45…

Addresses the issue of whether there exists a matrix language to a code-mixed (CM) sentence, or whether no feasible linguistic analysis can reliably assign a matrix language to a CM sentence. The examination draws on natural conversations involving Chinese-English CM in Singapore. (41 references) (GLR)

Provides a contemporary Government-and-Binding reinterpretation and evaluation of Klima and Bellugi's 1966 work on the acquisition of interrogatives. It is argued that wh-questions in Child English involve a wh-pronoun positioned in the head complementizer position within the Complementizer Phrase (CP) and that children learn that wh-questions…

Various aspects of writing style are discussed to propose concrete methods for improving students' performance. Topics covered include the relationship between syntactic and cognitive complexity and classroom techniques and the reformulation technique as applied to student writing samples. (Contains 20 references.) (LB)

Investigates the double compound that is a feature of the regional French of the langue d'oc and franco-provencal areas. Analysis suggests that, in addition to the temporal and aspectual properties traditionally attributed to this form, the expressive properties of the surcompose regional are central to any description of its function in…