Argues for a more rigorous application of accommodation theory in sociolinguistics, presenting an example of how such rigor might be pursued in an analysis of conversational Bislama, a creole spoken in the Republic of Vanuatu. Focus is on the link between speakers' identities and their linguistic behavior. (MSE)

Examines the speech communities associated with computer-mediated communication (CMC). Summarizes results from research and adds a critical perspective by questioning who is advantaged and disadvantaged by CMC. Brings these concerns to bear on the application of CMC to distance education, raising questions about its use in teaching English as a…

Several recent studies from our laboratory have shown that 14-month-old infants have difficulty learning to associate two phonetically similar new words to two different objects when tested in the Switch task. Because the infants can discriminate the same phonetic detail that they fail to use in the associative word-learning situation, we have…

In this study, the performance of apologies among 20 non-native speakers (NNSs) of English and 20 native speakers (NSs) of English was examined. Two questions were addressed: How did NNSs' apologies compare with NSs' in identical situations? What relationship existed between the performance of apologies by NNSs and Test of English as a Foreign…

A study of silent and filled pauses in second language speech analyzes (1) which types of pause are produced, (2) which are the functions of non-juncture pauses, (3) whether pauses co-occur with other hesitation phenomena, and (4) whether the occurrence of pauses is associated with second language proficiency. Subjects were 15 intermediate and…

This discussion of the development of oral proficiency in a second language first examines relevant research and then suggests guidelines for designing classroom techniques for teaching oral proficiency. Research in cognitive psychology is reviewed, focusing on information processing theory and forgetting theory. Research discussed in the area of…

The concept of "prominence" in intonation is discussed. It treats the prominence of a syllable as a feature determined by the speaker separate from the word itself, and meaningful in and of itself. The decision by a speaker to assign or not assign prominence to a syllable (selectivity) is seen as related to the immediacy of spoken…

A study designed to examine the variation that occurs in the request production of children between the ages of 6 and 7 observed the kind of requests children make, what they request, whom they ask, and how they formulate their ideas. Twenty native French-speaking children divided into two age groups (6- and 7-year-olds) were asked to complete two…

To relate the way in which children structure stories at different age levels to their performance on other tasks or to their general stage of cognitive development, a study required subjects of four age groups to participate in working memory tasks in two different paradigms and to generate stories involving a variety of characters. The structure…

Data from a language development project at the Polytechnic of Wales were used to compare the speech and writing of 48 monolingual English-speaking children. The 48 children came from three groups, aged 8, 10, and 12. For the collection of spoken data, the children, divided into groups of three, were tape recorded while they made a construction…

Recognizing that school personnel serving limited English proficient students would benefit from objective and valid measures of language assessment, a study viewed the oral language performance of second language learners of English between the ages of six and eight in order to chart the development of selected syntactic structures in their…

Two issues in language development are explored--the emergence of the ability to communicate and the relationship between emerging forms and functions. Solutions to these problems involve the notion of interpretation and depend on the fact that adults interpret children's behaviors as if they were meaningful according to the adult system. The…

Examines the nature of the convergent relationship between formal spoken and written discourse by focusing on three issues: (1) spoken vs. written modes; (2) formal vs. informal discourse; and (3) the relationship between oral ritual communication and written language and between ritual/written communication and everyday colloquial language. (SED)

Investigates the silent pauses in continuous speech in three genres: political speeches, political interviews, and casual interviews in order to see how the semantic-syntactic information of the message, the duration of silent pauses, and the acoustic environment of these pauses interact to produce the listener's perception of pauses. (Author/SED)

Presents findings of a survey of English as a second language students' attitudes toward and preferences for the correction of spoken errors by native speaker friends. The subjects reported positive attitudes toward error correction and claimed to prefer even more correction than their friends did. They saw correcting errors as facilitating--even…