Harry Levin

Hesitations in children's speech during explanation and description

Twenty-four children, six each from the kindergarten, second, fourth, and sixth grades, were shown three simple physical demonstrations. They described and explained what they saw. For children of all ages, explanation compared with description was characterized by more words, pauses, hesitations, longer pauses, and a slower rate of speaking.

The Prosodic and Paralinguistic Features of Reading and Telling Stories

Four teachers read and told preschool children well-known stories which were recorded. Two composite tapes were prepared from the recordings. Ten-second sections of tape were spliced together to form 112 randomly intermixed examples of each teacher reading and telling stories to two groups of children. Fifty-six items were treated by a low-pass filter which removed all content information but preserved prosodic and paralinguistic information. Two groups of 11 adult subjects each judged whether the segment was an example of reading or telling. For both filtered and unfiltered speech, the subjects could accurately discriminate reading from telling; they were more accurate on the unfiltered portions of the tape. A qualitative analysis of items easy and difficult to judge correctly, indicated a number of variables that were probably instrumental in making the reading-telling distinction. These variables were coded from the original unfiltered tapes. Reading appears to be more rapid and free of hesitations, which can be explained by story telling being a cognitively creative task. An important stylistic variant is the placement of the speaker-tag before or after a quotation. The tag after the quote is a literary form almost never used in telling stories; the tag before the quote is used both in reading and telling.

Hesitation Phenomena in Children's Speech:

Forty-eight children told two stories in each of two situations: to an audience of four adults, or to a microphone while no one was listening. Various fluency and hesitation variables were scored from the tapes. Subjects are consistent in their fluency and hesitations. A factor analysis of the speech measures yielded four factors. Deliberate hesitations are predictable, for boys, from the personality characteristic, exhibitionism. Stressful hesitations are responsive to whether the child was speaking in public or in private.

Eye-voice span (EVS) within active and passive sentences.

Intra-sentence contingency effects on the processing of sentences were examined by means of a technique which involved using the Eye-Voice Span (EVS) as a unit of decoding in oral reading. Target sentences, one half active and one half passive, were embedded in paragraphs which subjects read aloud. It was found that the EVS varied in accordance with intra-sentence constraints ; specifically, (1) the EVS was found to be greater in the more highly constrained passive form ; and (2) the EVS varied in accordance with the size and location of constituent boundaries within each form.

Constraints and the Eye-Voice Span in Right and Left Embedded Sentences

The nature of grammatical constraints and of reading are compared in left and right embedded sentences. Given the task of completing sentences with various parts deleted, subjects most frequently insert relative phrases after the main verb and use a variety of constructions before the verb. In each of three experiments, the eye-voice spans are larger in the right branching sentences indicating that processing is directed by the nature of the constraints within sentences.

The Formality of the Latinate Lexicon in English.

The hypothesis tested is that under instructions to be formal or in tasks that very in formality, English words whose origins are Latinate will be chosen in preference to words whose etymologies are Anglo-Saxon. In the first experiment, instructions to be neutral, moderately formal or very formal led to the completion of sentences by words that were Latinate and rare in preference to Anglo-Saxon synonyms. The second study asked subjects to imagine themselves in situations that were less or more formal, e.g., talking to a friend v. a job interview. The choices can be explained by textual frequencies of the words rather than their etymologies. Finally, a replication of the first experiment with neutral and strongly formal instructions indicated again that formality implies Latinate, textually infrequent words. We conclude that the strategy to be formal in writing or speaking must be explicitly given to the subjects and that the situations that call out Latinate choices must be unequivocally formal.

Learning to play doctor: Effects of sex, age, and experience in hospital

Twenty‐one children aged 4 to 9 years enacted four social roles—doctor, nurse, mother of sick child, and father of sick child—on two occasions, once shortly before and once shortly after the children themselves were hospitalized for minor elective surgerv. Measures were taken of the childrens skill at talking appropriately in each of the four roles, and at using specific features of the sick‐room register, that is, a nurturant style and the medical lexicon. The children improved significantly on number and length of in‐role utterances, and on their ability to make plot‐furthering contributions to the play sessions. The boys were generally less skillful at using in‐role language, especially the nurturant speech style. The girls’ better performance for the ‘female roles’ (nurse and mother) was particularly striking, whereas boys performed relatively better in the roles of doctor and father. If a major component of childrens failure to maintain the appropriate in‐role speech register is their lack of real‐...

Frequencies of Latinate and Germanic words in English as determinants of formality

Formality‐informality is an often cited descriptive dimension of language. The purpose of this study was to discover some properties of the formal lexicon in English. Subjects listened to five sets of utterances, each containing six interrelated items, and for each item chose a probable listener. The items were composed predominantly either of Latinate or of Germanic words, and of high and low frequency words within each etymology. Also, in each set two items were designed to compare the effects of slang. A prior analysis yielded two clusters of listeners: employer/professor or stranger (Formal) and close friend or brother/sister (Informal). Slang items were perceived overwhelmingly as addressed to informal listeners. Subjects judged that the Latinate items, more than the Germanic, were addressed to formal listeners. Within the Latinate forms, word frequency had no effects; among the Germanic forms, low frequency words were more formal than high frequency ones.

Situational Variations Within Social Speech Registers

Register has been defined (Ferguson, 1964; Hudson, 1980) as speech which is set off from other speech by its function as well as its form. For example, baby talk (BT), the most widely studied register, qualifies as a register because it is characterized both by a particular function—addressing infants and young children—and by a set of formal characteristics (high pitch, exaggerated intonation contours, special lexical items, frequent use of diminutives, grammatical simplicity, etc.) not present in normal conversation between adults. Similarly, foreigner talk (FT; see the papers in Clyne, 1981) has both functional and formal properties that set it off from other speech. The use of the formal properties of some particular register with an inappropriate function (e.g., using a BT utterance to address an adult), usually constitutes a novel, socially negotiated meaning such as humor or insult.

The incidence of inflectional suffixes and the classification of word forms

Summary The hypothesis tested in this study is that speakers of a language which is complexly inflected in the suffix position will attend more closely to the ends of word forms than speakers of a language carrying fewer and simpler inflections. Four groups each of Italian and American children were given sets of nonsense words to classify when the criterial attributes for the classifications were either terminal or initial elements in the paralogs. More Italian than American children sort correctly on the basis of terminal elements. There are no differences between the groups when the classification depends on the initial letters.