This paper discusses the interpretation of data on two types of phonological change: change in language over time in the culture, and change in the development of the individual speaker; and examines the position that these two sorts of change interact in a certain way in relation to phonological structure. If one conceives of phonology as a…

Keeping vocabulary and content constant, it was determined whether syntactically more complex structures increase reading difficulty or whether all students, regardless of grade level, have the same syntactic skills and thus read with equal facility materials written at different syntactic maturity levels. One hundred and twenty randomly selected…

The author initially cites the associationistic position of Spiker and the perceptual learning position of E. Gibson and concludes that the existing data does not clearly support either hypothesis. He describes a new approach designed to test these explanations of the role of verbal pretraining on subsequent discrimination learning. It consists of…

An investigation of response associations to 100 structural and lexical words was conducted in such a way as to observe commonalities of responses to the words, effects of sex differences on the commonalities, and effects of word learnability on the commonalities. Subjects were 80 white urban disadvantaged children, all 5 years old, divided into…

One of the essential differences between teaching a first and a second language is that the former is merely learned whereas the latter must usually be taught. This difference, while not absolute, still has enormous consequences. Although the "natural method" of second-language teaching is often championed, there is no way whereby the…

The study of verbal behavior has a long history in the Soviet Union, and some of the studies, especially those related to verbal conditioning and learning, have had considerable impact on Western research, particularly in the United States. The view set forth in this paper is that "voluntary behavior" is only that behavior which is…

This booklet contains four articles that discuss factors influencing language growth. The first, "The Child's Equipment for Language Growth" by Charlotte Wells, examines what the child needs for language learning, how the child uses his equipment for language growth, and what school factors facilitate the child's use of his equipment for language…

Discussed in this paper are reasons why people who speak second languages may not speak or write them with native-speaker-like fluency. These second-language deficiencies may be the results of (1) interference, the use of aspects of another language at a variety of levels; (2) strategies of learning such as over overgeneralization and analogy by…

The first section of this report consists of papers given at the two-day conference on social dialects at the Center for Applied Linguistics, October 1969: (1) "Social Dialects and the Field of Speech" by F. Williams, with response by O. Taylor; (2) "Approaches to Social Dialects in Early Childhood Education" by C. B. Cazden, with response by R.…

The effects of certain linguistic dimensions on auditory blending performance and training were examined. Dimensions included type of phonological context, consonant-vowel or vowel-consonant (CV or VC); units to be blended, syllables or phonemes (S or P); and size of units, single or double. Six ordered 96-word training blends were administered to…

Forty normal children aged 3 and-one-half to 5 and-one-half were tested on the pronunciation of initial /-1/, /-r/, and /s-/ clusters in 120 words, occurring 36, 48, and 42 times, respectively; other phonemes in the cluster occurred from 6 to 18 times. Articulation errors of individual subjects were examined for evidence of (1) degree and type of…

The paper shows informally how model-theoretical semantics may be used by a computer to give a straight-forward analysis of the meaning of children's language. This approach to semantics grows out of the main thrust of work in mathematical logic. It is discussed in the framework of generative grammar and is based on the application of the…

Traditionally linguists have considered pidgin languages as corrupted constructions of European vocabulary based on African or Asian syntax. Recent systematic studies of these languages show complex patterns of mutual influence on many levels. To explain the structural similarities of pidgin languages, some linguists, such as Keith Whinnom, have…

Data are presented to show that reinforcement and exact repetition of adult speech are beneficial but not necessary components of a modeling procedure which results in production of novel linguistic forms by children. Laboratory studies suggest the need for a re-evaluation of current hypotheses about the limited role of imitation in language…

Studies of the speech of 11 Yakima Indian children on a reservation in central Washington indicated a number of characteristics which were not found systematically in the speech of non-Indian children. These included differences in phonology; intonation contours; use of direct quotations; story-telling register; language play; availability of…