Noam Chomsky's numerous criticisms of formerly well-accepted beliefs about the nature of language learning (e.g. in his review of Skinner's "Verbal Behavior") have led to a diversity of views regarding the potential application of transformational theory to the teaching of English as a second language/dialect. It seems clear, moreover, that his…

The First Lincolnland Conference on Dialectology, held at Eastern Illinois University in March 1968, was attended by linguists and speech pathologists specializing in the areas of speech science, dialects, articulation disorders, language development and language disorders. The purposes of the conference were: (1) to review research dealing with…

The developmental patterns of written and oral syntax were investigated in a group of fourth, sixth, and eighth grade Omaha Indian children living in semipoverty in a rural reservation community. These findings were then compared with the findings of a similar study dealing with white children living in a different cultural, socioeconomic, and…

This volume presents a study of the clause as a verb-centered construction surrounded by certain nuclear constituents which serve to subcategorize it. Five India-Nepal languages are examined: Kotia Oriya, Kupia, and Maithili (Indo-Aryan family); and Dhanghar-Kurux and Kolani (Dravidian family). Dhangar-Kurux and Maithili are spoken in Nepal, the…

This paper deals with problems concerning the nature of the input to a phonetic processor. Several assumptions provide the basis for consideration of the problem. There is a phonological level of processing which reflects the sound structure of the language; the rules associated with it are not affected by variables associated either with the…

This book presents a study of speech, language, and behavior as related in the field of psycholinguistics. It confines itself to a limited number of topics which are treated in some depth. The first part of the book deals with theoretical foundations--discussing speech and language in terms of role, nature, semantic dimension, and pragmatic…

Sentence patterns are often crucial to the degree of understanding a child derives from the printed page, and if he is to fully understand what he reads, he must be able to analyze the written language patterns in which the information is conveyed. This study analyzed selected passages from three grade 4 basal reader series to determine which…

This paper discusses the validity and role of linguistic theory in terms of philosophy and logic and considers the relationship among these fields of human knowledge. The main objective of linguistic science is to discover the composition laws actually used by speech communities at any given moment in history. Linguistics is therefore not…

This study hypothesized that recent experience with a set of words is a strong influence on selecting words in an appropriate context where other lexical items are equally available for selection, i.e., recency training should significantly increase the probability of occurrence of words chosen to fill gaps in structured sentences. Two experiments…

This discussion considers the process of subject raising, which takes the constituent subject out of the complement clause and makes it a constituent of the matrix clause and the occurrence of this process in Japanese and in other subject-object-verb (SOV) languages. The first part of the paper demonstrates why subject raising is not a common…

The objective of this thesis was to colligate the various strands of research in the literature of computational linguistics that have to do with the computational treatment of semantic content so as to encode it into a computerized dictionary. In chapter 1 the course of mechanical translation (1947-1960) and quantitative linguistics is traced to…

The authors assessed the extent to which a generative prereading activity known as Story Impressions (SI), or composing a guess from clues, influences passage recall relative to a more passive prereading activity of reading a Content Preview (CP). The results from 74 eighth-grade students indicated the CP groups equaled the reading-only control…

This report offers a number of specific teaching techniques that research suggests will help 4th- to 12th-grade students in this nation's schools. The report focuses on all students, not just those who display writing difficulties, although this latter group is deservedly the focus of much attention. The premise of this report is that all students…

The process of embedding, a term used in generative grammar to refer to a construction in which a sentence is included within another sentence, is examined as it occurs in Yoruba literature. Examples are drawn from Yoruba praise poetry, in both written and oral form and within Yoruba novels. Forms of embedding identified include those to draw…

The eight papers in this issue are addressed to issues in pragmatics, semantics, syntax, discourse analysis, morphology, and particularly to issues touching on two or more of these areas at once. The final paper touches on phonology as well. The papers are: "The Myth of Semantic Presupposition," by Steven Boer and William Lycan; "A…