(2006). Early Child Grammars: Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis of Morphosyntactic Production. Cognitive Science, v30 n5 p803-835. This article reports on a series of 5 analyses of spontaneous production of verbal inflection (tense and person-number agreement) by 2-year-olds acquiring French as a native language. A formal analysis of the qualitative and quantitative results is developed using the unique resources of Optimality Theory (OT; Prince & Smolensky, 2004). It is argued that acquisition of morphosyntax proceeds via overlapping grammars (rather than through abrupt changes), which OT formalizes in terms of partial rather than total constraint rankings. Initially, economy of structure constraints take priority over faithfulness constraints that demand faithful expression of a speaker's intent, resulting in child production of tense that is comparable in level to that of child-directed speech. Using the independent Predominant Length of Utterance measure of syntactic development proposed in Vainikka, Legendre, and Todorova (1999), production of agreement is shown first to lag behind tense then to compete… [Direct]
(1968). Speculations on Performance Models. Journal of Linguistics, v4 n1 p47-68. According to the author, competence and performance and their interrelationships are the concern of linguistics. Performance models must: (1) be based on physical data of speech; (2) describe the phenomena under investigation; (3) predict events which are confirmed by experiment; (4) suggest causal relationships by identifying necessary and sufficient elements; (5) be consistent; (6) be formulated so that they can be proven incorrect. Katz' performance model, encoding sentences as units, is inadequate since actual speech is at least half in phrases of three words or less. Morphemes cannot be hypothesized as encoding units, as the number is too large for processing. Liberman's model, providing for overlapping of neuromuscular instructions to produce output units of about syllabic size is shown to disagree with the author's electromyographic data for different sequences of the same phonemes. But the work of Kozhevnikov, Ladefoged, Fry, and others, supports the hypothesis that encoding…
(1976). The Lasting Properties of Word-Counts. This study compared the vocabulary of the period from 1943 to 1945 to the vocabulary of 1975. In addition to a direct comparison of word use, an indirect comparison was made using Thorndike's word list in the \Teacher's Word Book\ (1931). The 1975 vocabulary, based on frequency of word appearance, was derived from 93 speeches made by students in public-speaking classes at Wabash College during 1975. Similar analysis of vocabulary made during the earlier period produced a system of categorization by word frequency, which was also used to evaluate the speech of 1975. Data indicated that, while the first two categories–the most frequently occurring words–correlated highly, the frequencies of remaining words were not highly correlated. The spoken vocabulary of 1975 was not found to differ markedly from the spoken vocabulary of the earlier period, in terms of the number of different words used; speakers during both periods tended to use their words in the same ratios. Overall, the two…
(1983). Information Technologies as Vehicles of Evolution. Technology contributes to the growth of human knowledge in five distinct, though overlapping, ways: (1) all technologies are material embodiments and thus more or less durable records of ideas that have survived some test with external reality; (2) telescopes, microscopes, and similar technologies extend external experience and knowledge to areas beyond human perception; (3) computers help people generate knowledge from otherwise overwhelming quantities of experiences; (4) the abstraction permitted by speech, writing, and similar media facilitate the evaluation and dissemination of knowledge; and (5) audiovisual media permit criticism and dissemination of relatively concrete representations of external reality. As the implementation of knowledge through technology significantly alters external reality, technology itself appears to play a decided role in our planet's evolutionary process. Neither human knowledge nor technology is free of unintended consequences, but they do inject an…
(2007). The Places of the Humanities: Thinking through Bureaucracy. Liberal Education, v93 n2 p34-39 Spr. Administrators hate to be called bureaucrats. They prefer to be seen as academic leaders. Leaders articulate priorities and values, serve as exemplars, and represent an institution to both others and itself. Today, more than ever, the humanities and the arts need academic leaders at every level of the university to give them voice, to avow their importance, to articulate the ways in which the humanities and arts speak for the university, the ways in which they give speech to the central values and value of a liberal education. Yet having been a dean for close to a decade, the author is aware that leadership takes place in an institutional and human infrastructure: a political landscape, a network of administrative hierarchies, faculty and academic senate committees, academic units with budgets, constituencies, needs, and responsibilities. Both day-to-day management and strategic planning take place in a bureaucracy, for better or for worse. The challenge for academic leaders is to… [PDF] [Direct]
(1985). Cross-Cultural Variability in Conversational Interactions. All speakers bring to even simple verbal encounters complex presuppositions and expectations that may create discourse interference. A second-language encounter carries a complex and often inexplicable expectation load. Language expresses meaning and intentions, but also carries social import. The value or appropriateness of speaking itself varies interculturally and intraculturally when it is considered in combination with sex, age, or participant status. Styles of presentation, including speech style, use of phatic communion, overlapping and turn-taking, and nonverbal behavior, vary considerably within and among groups. Nonnative speakers who do not know the codes or rituals of a group, or who use them inappropriately, will be judged, consciously or unconsciously, as inefficient in the communicative task. Discourse interference can even be produced by aspects of the second-language learning process, including instructor attitudes, the availability of appropriate social and… [PDF]
(1983). Domains of the Florida Performance Measurement System. This monograph sets forth in detail the concepts included in the five domains of teaching as identified by the Florida Coalition for the Development of a Performance Evaluation System. The first domain, planning, includes the concepts: (1) content coverage; (2) utilization of instructional materials; (3) activity structure; (4) goal focusing; and (5) diagnosis. The second domain, management of student conduct, covers eight concepts: (1) rule explication and monitoring; (2) teacher withitness; (3) overlapping (withitness); (4) quality of desist; (5) group alert; (6) movement smoothness; (7) movement slow-down; and (8) praise. The domain of instructional organization and development consists of the following concepts: (1) efficient use of time; (2) review of subject matter; (3) lesson development; (4) teacher treatment of student talk; (5) teacher academic feedback; and (6) management of seatwork/homework. In the domain of presentation of subject matter, the concepts discussed are… [PDF]
(1982). Research on Infancy of Special Relevance for Mental Health. Matrix No. 11A. Research relevant to planning and practice in the area of infant mental health is discussed in this paper. First, three examples of research approaches that reflect current attitudes are given. The first example represents those studies in which there is an effort to closely coordinate physiological and behavioral studies. The second example represents studies focusing on the infant and the caretaking environment as a living, biological system. The third example represents interest in the systematic study of affect development, some of it with the goal of theory building. It is pointed out that these three large and overlapping areas of currently intense inquiry are applicable to clinical practice in the early years and each depends partly on the study of deviations in development and in the parent-child relationship. In subsequent material, several other categories of studies relevant for the field of infant mental health are cited in condensed form. These include studies of (1)… [PDF]
(1969). Universals of Grammatical Development in Children. This report considers the early stages of grammatical development in the child. It summarizes some cross-linguistic similarities in acquisition of several different types of languages: English (both white and black, lower and middle class), German, Russian, Finnish, Samoan, and Luo. With this small but diverse collection of languages and cultures the author is in a position to consider varied speech input to the child and observe what remains constant in the course of language acquisition. He finds a number of small, intriguing differences but believes that \what is remarkable at first glance is the uniformity in rate and pattern of development.\ He traces stages of language development and points out the linguistic universals which manifest themselves at the various stages. Typically, in all cultures examined, there is a period of babbling ending somewhere around 18 months of age. Overlapping this period is a stage of single-word utterances, followed by a stage of two-word… [PDF]
(1986). Thinking with Verbs and Conjunctions. Basic writers often experience difficulties when trying to articulate ideas in writing that are more specific, systematic, and fully developed than their speech. The writers must learn how to put their thinking into the appropriate forms and expressions necessary to address an academic audience. Noting that the natural working of the human mind seems to develop ideas in traditional rhetorical modes, such as definition, classification, comparison, and cause-and-effect, F. D'angelo has presented a systematic list of 10 overlapping static and progressive logical patterns of arrangement. When students want to develop an idea in one of these patterns, they need to consider how to organize their information and to choose expressions and grammatical forms that relate to the parts of the patterns or networks. M. A. K. Halliday and R. Hasan have suggested a valuable system of terms that express relationships between sentences. Cohesion requires understanding the relationships of ideas and… [PDF]
(1983). The Critical Incident Technique: A Description of the Method. Critical Incident Technique (CIT) involves the collection of real-world examples of behavior that characterize either very effective or very ineffective performance of some activity. The principal advantage of the CIT is that it generates data based on actual behavior rather than on a particular researcher's subjectivity. The CIT has much to offer speech communication researchers, especially those in the applied communication area where the stress is on what actually works in real-world settings. Using the CIT, the research should collect and interpret examples of behavior from a sample before reviewing much of the existing literature on the subject. Questionnaire respondents should be told to think of recent examples related to the phenomenon being studied that stand out in their minds. These incidents are then subject to the equivalent of a content or factor analysis, sorted into a comprehensive list of behaviors. The researcher may elect to end the study and report or act on the…
(1988). Background, Education and Work as Predictors of Adult Skills. A study examined the validity of home background at age 13, educational achievement, and work experience as predictors of adult capabilities. The population examined were members of the grade 6 Swedish school population who were born in 1948 on the 5th, 15th, and 25th in each month of that year (n=12,000, or 10 percent of the total). Data about these individuals' family and socioeconomic background, academic achievement, and employment and occupational status were obtained from a national data base on them that had been established in 1961 and periodically updated. In 1980, follow-up data intended to give a broad picture of the participants as young adults were collected by means of questionnaires mailed to three partly overlapping subsamples of the initial 12,000. Home background data were gathered on 2,339 persons (1,126 men and 1,213 women), 500 of whom were contacted for follow-up interviews. These data were supplemented by quantitative indices of the individuals' vocabulary and…
(2005). \Uh\ and \Um\ Revisited: Are They Interjections for Signaling Delay?. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, v34 n6 p555-576 Nov. Clark and Fox Tree (2002) have presented empirical evidence, based primarily on the London-Lund corpus (LL; Svartvik & Quirk, 1980), that the fillers \uh\ and \um\ are conventional English words that signal a speaker's intention to initiate a minor and a major delay, respectively. We present here empirical analyses of \uh\ and \um\ and of silent pauses (delays) immediately following them in six media interviews of Hillary Clinton. Our evidence indicates that \uh\ and \um\ cannot serve as signals of upcoming delay, let alone signal it differentially: In most cases, both \uh\ and \um\ were not followed by a silent pause, that is, there was no delay at all; the silent pauses that did occur after \um\ were too short to be counted as major delays; finally, the distributions of durations of silent pauses after \uh\ and \um\ were almost entirely overlapping and could therefore not have served as reliable predictors for a listener. The discrepancies between Clark and Fox Tree's findings and… [Direct]