This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 23 titles deal with the following topics: sex appropriate and sex inappropriate language; lexical retrieval and perceptual errors; naming deficits in anomia and aphasia; developmental discourse; pragmatic information and contextual variation; identification of oral communication skills in children; syllabication and syllable structure in child language; growth of word meaning during middle childhood; children's responses to various levels of questions; temporal parameters within the speech signal applied to speaker identification; preschool children's awareness of function words as separable units in aural language; the vernacular lexicon of both black and white students in relation to rock music; formal operations and syntactical complexity in adult women's oral language; creative oral language in preoperational and concrete operational first grade students; children's questions and explanations; cognitive development, language acquisition, and the development of conditional reasoning in children; functions of preschool children's private speech; children's prior nonverbal color concepts and the learning of color words; sex differences in the development of verbal social responses; language experiences and activities in the home; children's explanations of word similarities in relation to word knownness; and the effect of language on young children's logical thought. (FL)