Tests three models describing the structure of talk and silence sequences within and across conversations: the Markov model, the independent decision model, and the incremental model. The implication for deriving dyadic interaction patterns from individual interaction styles is explored. (JMF)

Discusses various aspects of speech patterns and their importance in adult education: voice production, loudness, understanding speaking patterns, geographical influences, and aids to adult teachers and learners. (CT)

Analysis of speech samples from British female adults (N=8) revealed that the subjects increased vocal pitch when addressing young children, but not as much as previously studied North American subjects did. Pitch increases were more commonly observed in free speech than in reading-aloud conditions. (23 references) (Author/CB)

Examines the separate and combined impact of hedges, hesitations, and intensifiers on perceptions of authoritativeness, sociability, character, and similarity, and the extent to which messages containing one or more of these language variables differ from a "prototypically" powerless message in evaluative consequences. (MS)

Suggested is the use of discourse analysis to study the interpretive aspects of the supervisory conference. Interpretation of linguistic interactions should move beyond the examination of sequential aspects of conversation to incorporate rules of interpretation which account for presuppositions and implications underlying a given speech act. (SI)

In the current study, momentary time sampling (MTS) and partial-interval recording (PIR) were compared to continuous-duration recording of stereotypy and to the frequency of self-injury during a treatment analysis to determine whether the recording method affected data interpretation. Five previously conducted treatment analysis data sets were…

Students were trained to perceive filled pauses (FP) as a bad speech habit. In a series of classroom sensitivity training activities, followed by students being rewarded to observe twenty minutes of live television from the public media, no differences between male and female Business Communication students was revealed. The practice of teaching…

A study of the order of acquisition and fossilization of several French forms by anglophone students focused on the intonative aspect of interlanguage and the transfer of learning from one language to another. (MSE)

Describe studies in which day-long recordings were made of nine-year-old children's spontaneous speech. Results indicate that: (1) children aged five to 15 speak some 20,000 words of discourse per day in about two to three hours of pure speaking time; (2) they have an active vocabulary of some 3,000 word-form types. (SED)

Twelve primary grade children who inconsistently misarticulated "r" participated in training programs for specific allophones of "r." Training steps included production of syllables, nouns, noun phrases, and simple sentences. Generalizing to untrained allophones occurred for all children. (Author)

Reports experiments in which college students provided color names for a series of color stimuli, matched color names with the same stimuli, and described colors represented by a series of elaborate color terms. Sex-related differences were found in the matching task. Women used more elaborate descriptions than men. (Author/AMH)

Provides evidence that in producing voiceless stops in terms of voice-onset-time values, children first overshoot adult values and then only gradually draw back toward adult values. (Author/RL)

Answers some of William Page's criticisms (see preceding article, EJ 227 456) regarding the use of rhetoritherapy v behavior therapy to deal with students who exhibit communication apprehension. Argues that rhetoritherapy deals with people who have problems, not with problems. It is concerned with what can be done about the problem, not what the…

Seventeen patients with Asperger syndrome (AS) and a mean IQ of 97 were compared with a control group of 13 patients with normal intelligence or high-functioning autism. Results found that pedantic speech was common in the patients with AS and may help differentiate AS from high-functioning autism. (Author/CR)

Longitudinal studies of the application of a paraphrasing model to 18- to 28-month-olds indicated that mean length of utterance was significantly correlated with realized and paraphrased frequencies of several linguistic items in the subjects' corpora. The model was productive for examining children's corpora of speech and the linguistic…