This article discusses a study designed to obtain some information regarding the nature of the awareness children have of their own articulatory activity and the level of mental development at which this awareness appears. (Author/CFM)

Analyzes the various factors affecting the decline or the maintenance of the distinction between /e/ and /E/ in Poitou, France. (AM)

A phoneme confusion matrix consisting of 1,620 spontaneous speech errors was analyzed. It is shown that there is no tendency for linguistically unmarked consonants to replace marked consonants and that sound segment errors almost always involve the movement of unitary segments and not the movement of component distinctive features. (SW)

Reports on two experiments, one performed on infants, the other on adults, designed to examine the issue of categorical perception of speech contrasts in infants in relation to linguistic processing and the innateness theory of speech perception. (AM)

Investigated how learners' perception of second language segments is affected by their first language by examining native Korean and Japanese speakers' perception of nasal segments in English. Also examined the perceived relationship between English syllable-final nasals and Japanese categories to provide insight into why one of the contrasts was…

Two reading experiments investigated the extent to which the presence of phonemic repetition in sentences influenced processing difficulty during syntactic ambiguity resolution. In both experiments, participants read sentences silently as reading time was measured. Reading time on sentences containing a temporary syntactic ambiguity was compared…

A study investigated the hypothesis that, for adult native speakers of English, increasing syntactic complexity would lead to increased salience of phonological properties of words. The study also examined whether syntactic simplicity would lead to a greater salience of semantic properties of words. Subjects were required to name a word presented…

An alternative to the standard "rule based" account of a child's acquisition of the past tense in English is presented in this paper. While the rule based assumption suggests that children typically pass through a three-phase acquisition process in which they first learn past tense by rote, then learn the past tense rule and overregularize, and…

It has been reported (Terrell 1974) that in Cuban Spanish word-final /s/ aspiration is generally not affected by grammatical constraints, except for determiners in prevocalic environments. However, deletion of /s/, according to Terrell, is correlated with morphological classes and grammatical function, and is constrained by functional…

This study describes the segmental phonemes of five 4-year-old speakers of Black English, and analyzes both their language development and ethnic characteristics. The study group of Negro children, born and living in Washington, D.C., came from homes that met two of three specified criteria based on the mother's education and family income. The…

This research report examines the pronunciation that children give to synthetic words containing vowel-cluster spellings and analyzes the observed pronunciations in relation to common English words containing the same vowel clusters. The pronunciations associated with vowel-cluster spellings are among the most unpredictable letter-sound…

The two papers in this booklet comprise part of the research in the Hungarian-English Contrastive Linguistics Project, which is concerned with investigating the differences and similarities between the two languages with implications for second language acquisition. The first paper compares the obstruent clusters in English and Hungarian,…

This paper presents a linguistic discussion of play-languages--designated as ludlings by the author and tentatively defined as the result of a transformation or a series of transformations acting regularly on an ordinary language text, with the intent of altering the form, but not the content of the original message, for purposes of concealment or…

Three types of metalinguistic awareness and their relation to socioeconomic status, vocabulary, reading readiness skills, and reading acheivement were longitudinally studied in a sample of 40 kindergartners and 43 first graders. The three metalinguistic tasks were highly interrelated until the effects of oral language comprehension or vocabulary…

Discusses the possibility that early linguistic experience affects infant speech perception and that this effect may be of practical consequence in later language learning. (EKN)