AS OUR UNDERSTANDING OF THE LEARNING PROCESS AND OF THE NATURE AND FUNCTION OF SPOKEN AND WRITTEN AMERICAN-ENGLISH INCREASES, SPELLING INSTRUCTION IN THE ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS IS UNDERGOING A DRASTIC CHANGE. RECENT RESEARCH HAS REVEALED A BASIC LOGIC BEHIND THE SOUND-TO-LETTER RELATIONSHIP HITHERTO THOUGHT TO BE HAPHAZARD. BASED ON THE PREMISE THAT…

The Decoding Skills Test (DST) was developed to provide a detailed measurement of decoding skills which could be used in research on developmental dyslexia. Another purpose of the test is to provide a diagnostic-prescriptive instrument to be used in the evaluation of, and program planning for, children needing remedial reading. The test is…

This study sought to test the validity of the claim that certain Swedish and corresponding English vowel phonemes are indistinguishable when presented in a test containing isolated minimally contrastive words. It also sought to find a hierarchy of perceptual differences between Swedish and English phonemes. A series of 40 pairs of monosyllabic…

University students were the subjects of three experiments designed to determine the usefulness of elliptic speech in investigating the perception of the phonological structure of continuous speech. Five naturally spoken and five synthesized paragraphs were recorded in two different randomizations of phonological distortions and at two different…

Spanish American plural formation is discussed in relation to attempts that have been made to write a set of phonological rules that would correctly predict the Spanish plural using a combination of phonological rules and word structure constraints. A brief synopsis is resented of why previous attempts to predict the plural are in error.…

Language contact and the resulting interference has long been diagnosed as one of the primary forces behind language change. In cases of multilingual contact within geographically restricted areas, converging changes of the languages in contact have been uncovered and described. The geographic areas characterized by such linguistic situations came…

THIS PAPER PRESENTS FIRST A SUMMARY OF RESEARCH INVESTIGATING THE EXTENT TO WHICH THE KINDERGARTEN CHILD HAS ABSTRACTED IMPLICIT REGULARITIES IN THE FORMATION OF PLURALS IN ENGLISH. PRODUCTION AND RECOGNITION TASKS WERE USED. THE CHILDREN MADE MORE ERRORS WITH SYLLABLES REQUIRING THE ADDITION OR DELETION OF THE /IZ/ ALLOMORPH THAN WITH SYLLABLES…

The literature dealing with the identification process in beginning reading is surveyed. The first major section presents a review of the basal, Language Experience Approach, Phonic Word Method, linguistic, and i/t/a programs. Questions are raised about the empirical investigation of the subject matter and the instructional procedures used in…

Linguistic research has paid little attention to "fillers." These so-called "hesitation forms" can be classified as being either "buffers" or "back channel elicitors," the former being self-primers, and the latter being other-directed. These forms are difficult to distinguish without access to kinesic and…

The purposes of this study were to analyze the pronunciation of pupils and teachers to determine the deviation from the expected pronunciation for each group, and to determine the influence of dialect on reading performance of pupils. A random sample of 20 first grade pupils and 20 elementary teachers from four small, rural, all-white elementary…

Interview tapes of adult Cubans from the Latin American Capital Cities Dialect Project were transcribed, focusing on the variability in the deletion of word-final consonants, especially /s/. The operation of the deletion rule for /s/ in Cuban Spanish is shown to be principally dependent on grammatical categories and surface syntactic function. In…

Throughout the centuries in Spain, the Castilians and Catalans have shared cultural, social, political, generational, and human experiences. This exchange was bound to have a linguistic influence of the Castilian on the Catalan language. (In Catalonia bilingualism is prevalent, and in Castile it is not.) While there have been lexical changes, the…

This study focused upon (1) whether the errors of sixth-grade children in spelling American English words were related to the dialect spoken by the children, and (2) what effect the teaching of phoneme-grapheme correspondence rules based upon a single dialect pattern would have on the spelling of second-grade children. First, eight sixth-grade…

In this study the languages and culture of the Salish Indians of the northwestern United States are used to examine some of the relationships which obtain between language and culture. An introductory chapter provides justification for the study and discusses the statistical methodology used. In Chapter II the history of the Salish languages is…

The purpose of this manual is to assist the teacher in improving his teaching of English-as-a-second-language. It is particulary recommended for teachers of children whose mother tongue is Spanish. A preliminary test for teachers on English phonemes and identification of articulatory organs is included. The English sound system is described,…