Spanish-English bilingual and monolingual English children aged 3-5 years were recorded in interaction with their mothers. Bilingual children were recorded twice each month, once in Spanish and once in English, and were also observed in a home situation. An analysis of the recorded language was done using selected morphological and syntactic…

Two studies were conducted, with three-to-five-year-olds, to assess the relationship between language comprehension and production and the development of quantity concepts. The asymmetry of acquisition of adjectives, "big" and "little," was also assessed, as well as differences in the acquisition of the underlying concepts. In Experiment 1, it was…

Knowing which syllables are most commonly used should aid in linguistic research and in the preparation of curriculum materials, particularly in reading. A research project has been undertaken to develop unweighted and weighted (by the frequency of the words in which they appear) syllable lists. At present, two of the project's three phases are…

The position taken in this paper is that the sentence adverb should be viewed not as an occurrence within a sentence but as a kind of illocutionary force marker of a speech art. Three points are argued in the paper: (1) that current linguistic analyses of sentence adverbs are inadequate even to the purposes of the analysts; (2) that treating…

Fifteen English-speaking and fifteen French-speaking preschool children were each videotaped during two play sessions, one with a native and one with a non-native peer. Length of verbal utterances toward the non-native listener was significantly lower than toward the native listener, supporting the notion that native speakers adapt the amount of…

Eighty-four elementary school children participated in a two-part experiment replicating an earlier experiment that tested the hypothesis that children would offer semantic explanations for words presented orally more frequently than for words presented in written form. This experiment used subjects from a population different in socioeconomic…

An exploratory study investigated the communicative behaviors that differentiate talkative from reticent children. Four three-year-old girls who varied in degree of talkativeness were observed in naturalistic interactions with six to eight previously unfamiliar adults. All four children had demonstrated age-appropriate knowledge of linguistic…

The nature of grammatical relations such as subject and object are examined. The ways in which subjects differ from language to language are described and the way in which a language can do without a subject relation is revealed. Three primitive functional properties of sentences which underlie the syntactic relations of subject and topic are…

The study of schema theory as part of the inquiry into the nature of language comprehension has drawn attention to the reader's central role in the construction of text-guided meaning. Contemporary schema theory represnts a major step in the effort to move away from a reductionist view of reading comprehension. Specifically, it focuses on wbat…

A study was conducted to replicate and extend an earlier investigation of the persuasive effects of extended, intense concluding sex and death metaphors by using a more controlled design and by mixing metaphors. Fifty-eight high school students completed pretests assessing their attitudes toward a speech topic (legalization of marijuana). Two…

An experiment was conducted to determine the validity of the theory that language-disordered children use the same strategies in acquiring phonological phenonema, in this case consonant clusters, as normal children do but at a later age. In acquiring productive use of consonant clusters, normal children go through three stages: (1) reduction or…

An examination of the stylistic differences among writing from literary specialists, from science, and from social science shows that a more precise diagnosis of the writing problems of clarity and coherence is possible. Ten randomly selected paragraphs from each of four publications, the "Canadian Medical Association Journal," the "Canadian…

It is proposed in this paper that a developmental continuum functions between metaphors and the perception of metaphoric referents in both ordinary and aesthetic language use, and three levels of the metaphoring act are isolated: perceptual, analogical, and evaluative. These levels appear justified in terms of their functional association with…

The study was designed to determine whether inferences about implied elements are drawn during sentence comprehension. A cued recall procedure was employed. It was argued, for example, that if one computes the use of a hammer when "the worker pounded the nail" is encountered, that "hammer" should effectively cue the recall of the sentence; while a…

This paper discusses the notion that comprehension of language involves an active interpretative process entailing both a generating of expectations and a matching of expectations to the "incoming message." There are, however, two forms of discourse in which the relation of text to message differs from that holding in ordinary language.…