The collection of papers on linguistic experiments includes: "Discourse Functions of Pitch Range in Spontaneous and Read Speech" (Gayle M. Ayers); "When Is a Syllable Not a Syllable?" (Mary E. Beckman); "The Relationship between Syntactic and Semantic Processes in Sentence Comprehension" (Julie E. Boland); "The Influence of Orthography and…

Papers in phonology, psycholinguistics, and syntax include: "Discriminating between Syntactic and Semantic Processing: Evidence from Event-Related Potentials" (Kim Ainsworth-Darnell); "The Syntactic Structure of Chinese Formal Focus" (Qian Gao); "Employing a Multimodal Logic in an Approach to German Pronoun Fronting"…

The first seven issues of the Trans European Language Resources Infrastructure (TELRI) newsletter, a publication of the COPERNICUS project funded by the Commission of the European Communities, date from September 1995 to October 1997. The first three issues contain articles in the origins of TELRI, its members, working groups, and events. TELRI's…

A study of the relationship between university-level second language development and previous language and other experience is described. The study, in its early stages at the time of writing, is being conducted at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, and involves students of French, German, Italian, and Spanish. This report describes the subjects…

An analysis of the use of attenuation (structural or semantic softening of the speech act) and sentence structure in elicited speech acts by normally developing, learning disabled, and developmentally delayed populations is presented. In the normally developing population (1) the development of attenuation strategies is different from structural…

A group of elementary teachers enrolled in a graduate class in language arts at the University of North Dakota explored how children construct their own meanings as they interact with texts. One teacher regularly read to her 20-month-old grandson, and excerpts from the journal she kept reveal that his understanding of a specific text evolved to…

The concept of scaffolding can be used as a framework to argue that a "rich interpretation" in child language is needed in the area of early literacy learning. Child language is the reading-like text language of "prereading" kindergarten children. Two threads (internal and external) of the scaffolding process have been identified. The external…

Evidence from a nine-month longitudinal study of deaf children's early attempts at learning to read provides the construct for an instructional model that stresses that even though the children may have, at the least, a meager expressive sign language vocabulary, they can be lead successfully through the holophrastic or one-word stage of reading…

Papers given at an international conference applying the social sciences to the study of the relationships of languages include the following: "Reseaux sociaux et comportements langagiers en milieu de contact des langues" ("Social Networks and Language Behaviors in a Language Contact Setting") by M. Blanc and J. Hamers, with…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The five titles deal with the following topics: (1) a comparison of manuscript writing at the beginning of first grade with reading achievement at the end of first grade, (2) using text comprehension as a metaphor for understanding…

The acquisition of Irish as a second language in a four-year-old child of bilingual parents attending an Irish-language preschool group in Ireland is chronicled, with emphasis on the characteristic features of her language learning process and the factors determining which language she uses with others. The study was based on transcribed…

Research conducted since the early 1970s has provided important insights into how written language develops and how teachers can best foster that growth. One of these promotes the holistic approach to language instruction--to nurture the emergent speller is to nurture the emergent reader, writer, speaker, listener, and thinker. Another important…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 6 titles discuss the following topics: (1) the effects of comparison/contrast writing instruction on the reading comprehension of tenth-grade students; (2) an exploration of the role of language awareness in high school students'…

The past 20 years have seen research on language acquisition in the cognitive sciences grow immensely. The current paper offers a fairly extensive review of this literature, arguing that new cognitive theories and empirical data are perfectly consistent with core predictions a behavior analytic approach makes about language development. The review…

It is proposed that in studying the development of children's speech, the findings in the data are heavily influenced by what is expected to be found on the basis of our theoretical preconceptions. This phenomenon is actually more widespread than has previously been acknowledged, and our expectations about how children learn language may have to…