Barbara Sundene Wood

Negro Children's Speech : Some Social Class Differences in Word Predictability

Language samples of junior high school aged Negro girls of low and middle socio-economic classes were subjected to word predictability procedures undertaken by additional students from the same two populations. Results indicated that the middle class students could readily approximate the language of the middle and low class samples, but the lower class students did significantly more poorly in approximating the language of the middle class students, although they performed as well as the middle class students in approximating language in samples from students of their same social status.

How children “get their way”;: Directives in communication

Videotapes of young childrens conversations with peers were examined for compliance to directives. We found a broad range of compliance levels depending primarily on the status relationship of the two children. For the one‐up or dominant children in unequal status dyads, compliance levels were quite low. The highest indices of politeness were associated with the least successful directives of the one‐down children, while the lowest incidence of politeness cues were linked with the successful directives of the dominant children. Both requests and orders were equally effective for one‐up children and equally ineffective for the one‐down partners. Politeness and the illocutionary force (order versus request for action) functioned quite differently in the equal‐status dyads, however, and implications of this finding are important for instruction. Four instructional guidelines are offered for helping children develop effective controlling strategies in their elementary school years.

Two birds with one stone: Training communication specialists while teaching medical students

This study reports the implementation and assessment of one type of training program in medical communication at the University of Illinois in Chicago, involving both the Department of Communication and Theatre at the Circle Campus and the Department of Psychiatry at the Medical Center Campus. The three goals of this experimental program were to strengthen the quality of instruction in interpersonal skills for medical students, to offer a structured experience to graduate students in communication that would help them develop skills as instructors and researchers, and to emphasize the usefulness of communication specialists to faculty and students in the medical school.

Effects of feedback availability upon generation of left- and right-branching sentence structures.

It was reasoned that the capacity of short-term memory places limitations upon the syntactic structures produced by the human speaker, but that such limitations would be compensated for if the encoder had a continuous record (feedback) of his production during the creation of a sentence. Accordingly, this experiment involved having subjects create left-branching and right-branching sentence patterns (the former presumed to impose more demands upon short-term memory than the latter) under typewriting conditions where feedback was either available or was denied. Results indicated that although left-branching took relatively more processing time than right-branching, the anticipated interaction with feedback conditions was not realized. Moreover, in terms of error-rate, it was found that right-branching, rather than the predicted left-branching, was facilitated by the presence of feedback.

Competence and performance in language development

To expect children to use language as adults do is to ignore the distinction between linguistic competence and linguistic performance. This essay describes the distinction and the implications of it to the teaching of language.