Twenty-two hyperactive children were more spontaneously talkative than controls during transitions and nonverbal tasks (nonelicited conditions), but less talkative when asked to tell stories (elicited conditions). Findings suggest that minimal stimulus input precipitate excessive verbal activity from hyperactive children, while stories requiring…

The measurement of personality characteristics via the analysis of verbal communication is of interest due to its unobtrusive, accessible, and objective nature. The Mahl Speech Disturbance Indices, a procedure for assessing anxiety on the basis of speech disturbance patterns, was examined to assess the nature and reliability of the indices and…

Spectrographic analysis of two lectures given without notes by Simone de Beauvoir and Margaret Mead allow detailed specification of three forms of intonation characteristic of declarative sentences in English and French. Discussion of the objectives, of analysis procedures, and of results of the study which elaborate on intonational differences…

The author reports on an investigation of the variations in total verbal output and in verbal variety noted from interview responses of eighteen persons, each involved with a specific issue or topic at one of three levels. He defines the levels as: (1) observer, or someone who is aware of the issue but passive about it; (2) participant, or one who…

Disfluent phenomena such as pauses, hesitations, and repairs are investigated in 42 short samples of spontaneous speech of native French speakers and learners of French. It is found that native speakers attend to the construction of the referent, whereas learners are more concerned with syntactic construction. (Contains 14 references.) (Author/LB)

This article summarizes early work on child language learning and reviews more recent work. It appears that recent research shows that children's linguistic cues, spoken by adults, are slower, less varied and more concrete than adult-adult speech. (Available from North-Holland Publishing Co., P. O. Box 211, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.) (CHK)

The Yakima Indians of central Washington, speakers of Sahaptin, believe that children should be treated with great respect. For the most part, the Yakimas express strongly negative attitudes about using any form of baby talk while speaking to children. Through interviews conducted with native speakers of Sahaptin, a list of words and expressions…

Thirty-six subjects were administered the 16PF and participated in a brief, unstructured interview. Paralinguistic behavior (fluency, duration and speech rate) were scored from tapes of the interviews and correlated to personality characteristics. Four significant relationships emerged revealing that fluency is related to adventurousness; duration…

Examines a grammar of conversation using three units of analysis: talk acts (statements, questions, agreements, and disagreements); turns at talk; and topic sequences. Rules covering the use of talk acts and definitions of units of analysis provide the basis for propositions about the location of categories of talk acts. (JMF)

Vocal cues which were inconsistent with verbal messages and their effects on teacher credibility were examined. Results suggested that teacher credibility was at least partially dependent upon the degree of verbal vocal consistency in teachers' messages. (Author/MH)

References to the study of behavioral organization of face-to-face interaction are arrranged in alphabetical order by author. A subject classification of works in the bibliography is appended. (EJS)

The intent of this study was to examine the development of three aspects of preschoolers' private speech: coefficients of egocentricism, the extent to which speech regulates actions, and the syntactic and semantic structures of individual utterances. Forty-one randomly chosen preschoolers (26 females, 15 males) were placed in three age groups (3,…

A detailed, spectrographic analysis of two lectures, given by Diego Rivera and Margaret Mead, which were chosen for their realistic naturalness, permits a graphic presentation and description of the patterns of three types of intonation within the declarative sentence in Spanish and American English. They include a minor continuation (A), major…