Presents a case study of a six-year-old Finnish girl who learned a foreign language by watching English language cartoons on video, without formal teaching or contact with native speakers. Topics addressed include television versus video; sentence structure; rate of speech; repetition; and learning by viewing versus naturalistic language learning.…

Describes a study that examined the effectiveness of 1 configuration of automatic speech recognition software and hardware with 36 3 year olds and a comparison control group of 20 adults. The greater variability of children's speech is discussed; possible system modifications are considered; and future research is suggested. (18 references) (LRW)

This study examined the way medical clinicians speak about numbers in orally presenting the results of research. Presentations by a sample of eight physicians and surgeons were selected and the manner in which numerical data on the slides were referred to was analyzed. Overall in the sample, it was four times more common to speak about data on…

The study evaluated the effects of an auditory monitoring and feedback approach on an adolescent boy's schizophrenic language patterns. The approach attempted to increase the subject's auditory awareness and to train him to identify and correct the linguistic errors of others and, eventually, of himself. Language samples were analyzed at baseline…

A study investigated the hypothesis that children are sensitive to functors in language and only omit them due to factors specific to speech production and after having analyzed them as separate morphemes. This hypothesis was tested as an alternative to two existing hypotheses concerning children's selective listening for content words and for…

A study of the use of the complex Finnish morphological rule system in 45 children, aged 20-24 months, examined the children's inflection of nouns and verbs in speech characteristic of everyday Finnish. Analysis of the correct, unanswered, and incorrect test items found six classes of errors, which were then examined for clues to the underlying…

Sixty undergraduate women interacted in dyads with female experimental confederates in a study of the interactive effects of social attributions and environmental controllability on interpersonal assertion. The environment was systematically varied on two dimensions of social power or control: (1) social responsiveness of the confederate, and (2)…

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,…

This review of the literature on self-speech, a subset of a communicative speech (speech not intended for nor effectively adapted for communication with others), focuses on the concept of self-control through language. The theories of six major researchers in the area of self-speech--J. Piaget, L. Vygotsky, A. Luria, H. Reese, J. Flavell, and L.…

Part of a larger investigation of the rhetorical character of the presidencies of Harry Truman through Jimmy Carter, this report concentrates on the presidents' linguistic styles and their semantic choices. The first half of the report discusses the background of the study and the development of a computerized language analysis…

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…

Written for all persons involved in the behavior of stuttering, the book presents factors associated with the onset of stuttering and a plan for alleviation. Stuttering is viewed as learned behavior; the production of normal and stuttered speech, that stuttering is nonhereditary and nonorganic, and the ways in which it is learned and why it is…

This study was designed to investigate, describe, and compare the intonation patterns of Black English and Standard English speaking children in a reading (formal) and free discourse (informal) situation. Black English was defined as the linguistic code of the subjects sampled from the inner city black poverty area schools, and Standard English as…

Two lower socioeconomic groups (one black and one white) from the inner city and a third group of white children from a middle socioeconomic suburban area of Chicago were studied to delineate and compare the usage of selected language structures among children of different social and ethnic backgrounds. Usage of each of the test structures was…

A report on a study exploring the relationship between observed variability in second-language speech and the process in which correct variants are acquired and incorrect ones are replaced. Three phonological variables in the English speech of French-Canadian second-language speakers in Montreal were investigated. The method, results and…