This paper compares the oral version of a Wolaamo (N. Ethiopia) fable as told by a local storyteller, with the same fable as edited by a more educated Wolaamo. The editorial changes in the written version include

• correction of performance errors
• elimination of repetition and redundancy
• omission of formulaic abstract and coda, and
• deletion of a suspense-building parenthetical paragraph. (gk)

Basso draws a parallel between speech and writing. The latter should be considered a complex social activity as well as a structured code. As such, it can be described systemically in a way analogous to how Hymes describes speech, focusing on folk taxonomies of writing events. Some important aspects of such an account are

• alternative representations
• rules of spelling
• reading order
• graphic devices, and
• acquisition of the code.

An abbreviated sample analysis of letter writing in American English is presented. (ova)

Emerson said, “Parts of speech are metaphors because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.” Comparative noetics, in something of a Whorfian manner, looks back in time in one's own culture or out in space to another culture, to see ways of shaping, storing, retrieving, and communicating knowledge. Languages select certain patterns from nature, different sets of regularities around which to build coherence. These regularities, for example, tense in English, are felt to be natural to language. To learn a new language, therefore, involves learning a new relationship with nature.

The process of defamiliarization, seeing the familiar in a new way, is one result of learning another language. For example, Javanese makes one see English in a new way; it defamiliarizes it. Thus, Javanese is a metaphor of English and vice versa. (gk)

Adapting the syntactic taxonomy of C. C. Fries (1952), this study compares spoken and written style, represented by sentential samples randomly selected from the speeches and articles of four public figures. Although the author concludes that syntactic differences are a function of individual style rather than mode, there are findings (namely, the use of verb tense and voice) which suggest that some syntactic features are partial indicators of oral/written style. (cva)

Bloomfield says that what are considered good, standard, or correct forms of English are based on written English, which in turn evolved from the language spoken by educated city-dwellers with status. Ultimately, the correct form probably derives from the form used by people with status. (jl)

Branks outlines a technique for eliciting oral editing of spoken discourse in Guambiano, an unwritten language of Colombia. His technique involves recording six retellings of the same text by the same native speaker. In general, he found the greatest difference between the first and second texts, with both referential and grammatical changes. From the third text on, there was a definite “settling-in” to patterns of rhetorical and grammatical forms, even with retellings after a week's interval. In retelling, when the speaker's “performance has caught up with his competence,” we have an indication of the aesthetically satisfying patterns of the language. (gk)

In analyzing Native American oral narrative as verse, or poetry, Bright raises questions as to the universality of the distinction between prose and poetry, as well as how to recognize poetry in another culture and the danger of imposing English-based categories on linguistic data from other cultures. Native American oral narratives are now being analyzed seriously as literature, from both linguistic and literary viewpoints. In an attempt to identify structures of verse in the myths of Karok (California), it was found that the approaches of Tedlock, focusing on the expressive features of performance, and that of Hymes, identifying verses in terms of linguistic structure, coincide 90 percent of the time in their identification of basic units.

This article discusses differences between spoken and written language within the framework of problems the foreign student has in trying to understand spontaneous speech. The paper highlights differences in manner of

• production
• learning and memory
• speaker/writer and audience interaction, and
• function of written and spoken language. (gk)

“It is the theme of the present article that … literacy in a society, or the lack of it plays an important part in shaping the minds of [people] and the patterns of their mental breakdown. Schizophrenic delusional systematization, paranoia, and depression are relatively lacking in nonliterate peoples around the world. The form of psychosis most commonly found in nonliterate societies is a temporary stare of excited confusion, accompanied by fear, panic, and sometimes externally directed violence. Nonliterate psychotics direct hostility outward more than their European counterparts and express it with greater directness and freedom. Carothers advances some tentative theories as to why this is so. (j1)

This article suggests that the inability to simultaneously see two images in a visual pun is the result of literacy. (gk)

Don Juan, a Yaqui Indian sorcerer, attempts to convey his knowledge to Carlos, an anthropologist doing field work. World views collide. Don Juan finds Carlos' habit of note-taking and journal-writing particularly hilarious. (j1)

The author's main points are that written language is integrated and detached, while spoken language is fragmented and involved. He proposes considering spoken language in terms of idea units of around six words, uttered with a coherent intonation contour. These units are often linked with and or some other coordinating conjunction. While in speech, one idea unit at a time is produced and is unmarked as to what precedes or follows it. In writing (which is slower than speech), there is time to integrate a succession of ideas into a single whole. Therefore, speech in contrast to writing, is characterized by zero integration or maximum fragmentation. Speech and writing also differ according to the type or relation they imply with their audience. While speakers are concerned with experiential richness, writers produce something which is consistent and defensible over time and space. (a-mc)

The authors analyze cognitive activity of the Kpelle of Liberia. They conclude that Kpelle cognitive development is not lower than that of the West, only that it takes different forms because it is shaped by different situations. The authors include a good discussion of the differences between Western and traditional forms of learning, and the effect of Western schools--including literacy--on Kpelle thinking and culture. (jl)

In a section entitled “Separating education from other cultural variation” (118--121), the authors discuss data Scribner obtained on “sorting behavior of Kpelle tribal children and adults who had varying degrees of involvement in Western-style living as well as education.” (See Greenfield and Bruner 1969, below, for an almost identical study with slightly different conclusions). They conclude that contact with Western-style living will produce Western-style sorting of objects, but only Western schooling of an individual will produce the ability to explain why she or he grouped things in a particular way. “The most robust effects of education appeared to be on verbalization.” (j1)

Coulmas discusses how writing, usually regarded as only a derivative of spoken language, in fact influences the development of spoken language. He takes examples from Japanese, showing ways in which the adoption of Chinese script 1,500 years ago affected the development of spoken Japanese. (j1)

Speakers have available to them the option of four intonation systems--tone, prominence, key, and termination--to add intonational meaning to lexicogrammatical meanings. All four systems are realized by pitch phenomena and all are potentially realizable in a single syllable. Of the four proposed unite of structure--syllable, segment, tone unit, and pitch sequence--the tone unit, not clause, is the unit of analysis, resulting in intonational rather than grammatically motivated divisions. Intonation is primarily concerned with adding specific interactional significance to basic lexicogrammatical meaning. (gk)

A study of some 30 spoken and written texts in Wik-Munkan, a language spoken by approximately 800 people in Australia, indicates several consistent stylistic differences between the two modes. (gk)

This quantitative study was based on an 18,000-word sample of the expository writing and extemporaneous discussion of 10 male speech teachers. Controlling for topic, it compared the frequency of occurrence of six psychogrammatical features--word classes indicating personal intrusion/detachment from the text, and quantitative precision of the speaker/writer. Oral style contained more words indicative of personal involvement and of relatively less precise quantification. Written style displayed a converse pattern. (cva)

The formula used in this study of abstraction is Gillie's (1957) simplified version of the Flesch (1950) formula. The predictable results were that oral language was significantly less abstract, and contained more finite verbs and less nouns of abstraction than written language. (gk)

In this analysis, episodes are treated as semantic units of discourse, manifested on the surface by paragraphs, generally with clear boundary markers in both spoken and written language. An episode of a discourse is a sequence of related propositions that are subsumed under some more global macroproposition, a theme, topic, or gist. Any change of time, place, participants, or global event or action generally indicates a new episode.

Episodic analysis is useful, not only for event and action discourse, but also for static text types, such as news reports of policy or opinions.

In a cognitive model of discourse processing, the episode is seen as a psychological unit, slice processing and memory of discourse are organised by episodic chunks and episode boundaries. Properly marked episodes facilitate understanding texts as a whole, as well as retrieval and recall. (cva)

Drieman compared written texts and transcripts of tape-recordings taken from eight graduate students, describing two similar pictures, one in each mode, under controlled conditions. He sums up his conclusions: “In written language, as compared to spoken language, we find shorter texts, longer words, fewer words of one syllable, more words of more than one syllable, more attributive qualities, a more varied vocabulary.” (j1)

This is a far-ranging discussion of the effects of printing on early modern European civilization and thought. It analyzes the relationship of printing to changes in politics, religion, class structure, schooling, philosophy, geography, law, the role of the artist; also, the effect that layout, pagination, headings, table of contents and punctuation marks (codifying, clarifying, and cataloging data) had on modes of thinking. It includes some comments on McLuhan's work (The Gutenberg Galaxy) from a serious historian's perspective. (jl)

The production resources that conversationalists make use of in cohesively tying together topics across turns of speaking include immediately local resources, local resources once removed, and nonlocal resources. Speakers use

• posture and gaze
• listing routines
• commonplace sources of topical content, and
• rhythmic organization of speech prosody to maintain cohesion both within and across multiple conversational floors, talking simultaneously without apparent interference, interruption, or other damage to intelligibility or appropriateness.

Speakers in such situations achieve a kind of rhythmic integration, a sensitivity to rhythmic action within and across conversational pairs. Two sets of conversational rhythm patterns, shown on a musical score, articulate together in one overall rhythmic shape or ensemble. (gk)

This article describes an investigation into the ways in which school children interact with certain standardized tests of reading comprehension. In order to isolate and describe the types of skills and processes a reader needs in order to get out of a passage what the writer intended, Fillmore invented an abstract ideal reader who, at each point in the text (1) knows everything the text presupposes at that point, and (2) does not know, but is prepared to receive and understand, precisely what the text introduces at that point. A real reader, in contrast to the abstract ideal reader, can be either over or underqualified at any point of the text. (gk)

The authors had 12 subjects comment on matched pictures (two still lifes, two Brueghels, two stories without words), describing one picture in each category in writing, and one orally. The written and oral descriptions were analyzed and compared, and it was found that:

1. Oral descriptions were an average of 1.85 times longer than written descriptions
2. Slightly more adjectives than verbs were used in the written versions; more verbs than adjectives were used in the spoken versions
3. The ratio of different words used to total number of words used was slightly higher in the written versions than in the oral (j1)

Extending experimental investigations of oral/written style differences, with a view to improving communication and instruction, three standardized criterion measures were used in comparing and contrasting the two channels: Flesch Reading-Ease and Human Interest Scores and Type-Token Ratios. Based on a sample of prepared oral and written language of 45 beginning speech students, the study concludes that spoken style is significantly more readable, interesting, and contains simpler vocabulary. (cva)

The topic of Goffman's lecture is lectures. “The following paper … was designed to be spoken, and through its text and delivery to provide an actual instance--not merely a discussion--of some differences between talk and the printed word.” It is “weakened by the fact that the original speaking was not extemporaneous talk, merely aloud reading from a typed text” (168--169). Some differences between a lecture and a printed text, according to Goffman, are:

1. The lecturer is not only the author of his text, he is also a performer.
2. The lecture as a whole is a social affair, which private reading is not.
3. The lecturer must adapt his remarks to the particular audience at hand.

4. There are possibilities for more spontaneity and intimacy in lecturing than in writing. Spontaneity and intimacy can occur in

   • text brackets (opening and closing remarks)
   • overlayed keyings (sarcasm, irony, and jokes which depend on distance from the text)
   • text parenthetical remarks (asides and elaborations from the read text), and
   • noise (the speaker's personal style--fidgeting, pauses, stuttering, and so forth). (jl)

The pedagogic implications of 35 linguistic features which characterize teacher-rated oral and written compositions of 11th graders are discussed. Using highest- and lowest-rated compositions, frequency counts, and significance tests were done on the 35 linguistic features comprising three levels of linguistic structure. Interesting findings related to the oral/written contrast include the following:

• Males are rated better than females in speaking (in terms of quality).
• A complementary pattern exists for writing (in terms of quantity).
• Present-tense is used most frequently in low-rated oral compositions.
• There are fewer interpretive statements in high-rated written compositions. (cva)

Contents:

This is a diffuse but interesting exposition of the blurring of distinctions in anthropological analyses, inherent in the use of tabular display (a literate device) of cultural phenomena which are not necessarily literate, but are orally preserved. It also points out the possibility of the imposition of types of categorization (that is, dualism) inappropriate to the cultural data, merely because of literate demands (for example, two-dimensional tables) that impose rigid nonmanipulable associations where more complex context-dependent associations may be operating. Goody observes that tables lessen in complexity as material associated with civilized societies. ( jl)

Goody analyzes the effects of writing on modes of thought. He rejects the idea of a dichotomy between primitive and civilized cognitive processes. Rather, he shows how a change in the means of communication (oral to literate) shaped the development of the rational, critical thinking in oral cultures do not. (jl)

Goody discusses concepts and techniques of memorization in oral and literate cultures. (jl)

The authors discuss the causal link between widespread literacy and

• the development of a historical and critical perspective
• maps
• impersonal monotheism
• individualism, and
• specialization in Western culture.

They discuss Greece in the fifth century B.C., when widespread literacy and its consequences first appeared. The authors also relate the different tasks of anthropology and sociology to the different demands of studying oral or literate societies. (jl)

Over a period of 14 days, a teacher read 10 books, two each by five different authors, to a group of five-year-olds. Subsequently, six of the 13 children were able to identify the authorship of three or more of five other stories by the same authors. This ability to appreciate and discriminate among literary styles includes noticing and abstracting from both very fine details of wordcraft and global structural matters of form and content.

This study suggests that part of the reading problem of seven-year-olds could be the stylistic properties of graded readers. Their simplified style could lead to

• a loss of coherence and interest
• depriving children of the satisfaction of meeting a challenge, and
• contributing to making learning to read an unpleasant experience. (gk)

This article examines the purpose and audience for which the Greeks wrote and spoke, and the effect that medium had on their works. Homeric poems, Greek drama, elegy, and prose are discussed. (cva)

The author contrasts cognitive development of speakers of unwritten versus speakers of written languages. She concludes that people in literate cultures develop both abstract thinking and the concept of different points of view of reality; people widens in scope. Therefore certain assumed cultural similarities may be due to matrix demands rather than to cognitive similarities. There is probably a reduction of oral complexity to graphic simplicity. (ova)

Greenfield and Bruner examine how different cultures specifically traditional African cultures and Western culture can result in different cognitive growth. In “traditional, collectively oriented society,” the distinction between inner/outer, or psychological phenomena/external world, “never gets made.” School--always connected with written language--is the variable that changes cognitive growth, destroying the unity of word and immediately-present object, thus making self-conscious thought and individuality possible. (jl)

In order to make more precise the idea of what referential elements are being dealt with at each stage of a text, as well as when one set of referents is temporarily replaced by another, Grimes proposes an indexing with combinations of the properties of identity, place, and time. As an example, the Gettysburg Address is analyzed within an overall framework of four time periods or referential complexes: atemporal elements, the nation complex, the battle complex, and the speech-related complex. As each portion of the text is related to this overall referential framework, its parts sort themselves into four connected subsystems. Charts display how one referential complex is laid aside temporarily for another, then picked up again later. (gk)

In discussing literacy among the Cherokees, Halle points out that the Cherokee had a very high rate of literacy, both in their native language and in English, in the 1800s. But that when their schools were taken over by the federal government in the 1900s, literacy declined; school is now seen as a white man's institution, which leads to the break-up of the family and death of their society. Any discussion of why schools fall to teach literacy to minority groups should put social and cultural factors above all others being considered, such as orthographic systems, proper sequencing of reading materials, and so forth. (jl)

Halliday points out that, although writing and language are often considered coterminous, writing and speech differ in several important aspects, including

• immediacy
• relation to context
• lexical density, and
• grammatical complexity.

Because of these differences, the maxim “write as you speak” should be observed in helping children bridge the gap to literacy. (cva)

The author compared oral and written language in school children aged 9, 11, 13, and 15. He found that:

1. At all ages, oral stories were longer than written stories
2. Sentences grew longer in written language with increase in age. Up to 13 years, spoken sentences were longer than written sentences; after 13, written sentences were longer than spoken ones
3. The number of adjectives used grew with increase in age. At 9 years, more adjectives were used in spoken than in written language; after 9, more were used in written language
4. The number of adverbs used was greater, at all ages, in written than in spoken language
5. The complexity of the written sentence grew faster with age than that of the spoken sentence. (jl)

This article includes a discussion of the different characteristics of written and spoken language as they pertain to language planning. The advantage of written language is that it overcomes idiosyncrasies and idiolects, stressing standard pronunciation and orthography; therefore, it is a vehicle for clear communication between speakers separated in time or space. The disadvantage of written language is that it lacks the immediate feedback and corrections which face-to-face spoken language provides. (mc)

Havelock's thesis is that there was a changeover in mentality between oral and written tradition in ancient Greece, He supports his thesis by examining the differences in style, vocabulary, content, aims, and attitude of traditional oral verse and later written texts. (jl)

The subtitles are instructive: “I. The transcription of the code of a nonliterate culture”; “II. The character and content of the code.” Proposes that the Greek writing system allowed the self-conscious preservation of culture, and that--related to this--the purpose of much of early Greek literature (for example, Homeric epics) was didactic rather than literary. (cva)

Havelock says the necessity to recall important material in oral cultures dictated the form in which it was presented. With literacy, people were freed from the need to recall material and also from the forms they had developed to facilitate recall; a new syntax and vocabulary evolved, peculiar to literacy. (jl)

Speakers of Quiche and Cakchiquel, in a five-day intensive workshop, began to develop written styles for dialog and drama, their preferred genre. (gk)

This experimental study considers the acquisition by children of inferential ability as an important aspect of comprehension. It concludes that reading biases comprehension toward explicit information (in the text), while listening biases it towards the gist of the story (invited inference). (cva)

Assuming that writing is more deliberate than speech, this study expected to find that the forger activity would demand more time for preparation and exposition. The study controls for these two factors, as well as for topic, in comparing the two activities and confirms the initial assumption. It also found that spoken messages are more redundant. (cva)

Analysis of texts in the Nasioi language, spoken on the east coast of Bougainville in the North Solomons Province, shows in essence that written discourse is less wordy and more concise than its oral counterpart. (gk)

This paper focuses on the problems of writing instruction for speakers of languages without a literate, written tradition. (gk)

This paper argues that a theory of linguistics which accounts for intuitions of native speakers about their language must explain “… the ready selection and rejection of certain cues from oral language by newly-literate readers and nascent authors in nonliterary societies” (7). Johnston's concepts of editing include:

1. Appropriacy editings--amendments to the text to compensate for loss of intonation and gestural cues in spoken language
2. Acceptability editings--amendments to remove any remaining ambiguity, and provide stylistic elegance (gk)

Partial list of contents:

Kay describes what he calls autonomous speech--the speech used by educated people for technical and abstract communication, appropriate for communication over large distances and between strangers and especially for written communication. He describes how this system of speech evolves out of nonautonomous or local systems of speech. (jl)

Reports on the striking positive correlation between membership in the street culture of preadolescent Negro boys and reading failure. Posits that this failure is due to the identification of reading as an activity of the school, which is “hostile, distant, and essentially irrelevant.” (cva)

Since types of discourse differ in purpose as well as surface configuration, classification of discourse types needs to include and compare form and function together. In a comparison of ordinary conversation to persuasive discourse types such as advertising, propaganda, political rhetoric, and religious sermons, the following features are discussed and illustrated:

1. Reciprocity
2. Bilaterality
3. Spontaneity
4. Novelty
5. Audience or addressee function
6. Power relationship among participants
7. Means of persuasion
8. Adherence to Gricean conversational maxims (gk)

Lord describes how oral epic songs were composed and passed on in Yugoslavia up to the time of the Second World War. Singers remembered and composed songs, not word for word, but with the aid of formulaic devices. He also discusses the effect of live performances on the creation of songs, and the role of the oral poet in his society. (jl)

Lord asks, “In exactly what ways do … written texts affect … oral tradition?” To answer, he compares modern (1930s) oral performances with 100-year-old texts of the same Yugoslav tales. He finds that, when the singer is literate, he depends on the older texts, and follows them in lines that are sometimes identical, sometimes close, sometimes merely corresponding to those written. When the singer is illiterate, there is no direct correspondence between his oral performance and the written text. (jl)

The hypothesis of this paper is that “for the minority child in most American public schools, success in reading and success in social interaction with one's peers in the classroom are mutually exclusive.” Thus, many minority children deliberately learn not to read. (jl)

According to the author, print made possible

• uniformity of lexical use
• historical awareness
• stylistic homogeneity within a given work, and
• fixed word order. (cva)

“Any technology tends to create a new human environment.” In this book, McLuhan presents the technology of print, showing its effect on the individual and society. (jl)

McLuhan writes about the sensory, cognitive, psychological, and social effects of literacy; also about effects of other media on human personality and social organization. (jl)

In this article, Morgan examines and criticizes several of the arguments of discourse analysts against independent generative sentence grammar as an adequate account for sentence syntax and semantics. He also discusses the tantalizing possibilities of a yet undefined alternative theory which treats sentence phenomena and discourse phenomena in a single unified theory, without a distinguishable sentential subcomponent. Such a theory would either subsume sentence grammar or provide a radical reformulation of it in discourse terms. (gk)

This articles discusses

• discourse types
• elements of style
• testing for difficulties of style, and
• the development of good style on the part of indigenous writers.

Nida suggests the following differences between oral and written style (156):

After giving a brief historical perspective on literacy, Nida discusses the value of literacy in preliterate societies, from the viewpoint of the reader, including suggestions of possible motivational factors. The problem of language choice for literacy and literature is discussed for two types of situations:

1. Languages without literary tradition in multilingual countries
2. Different linguistic levels--literary, middle, and simple forms of language--for languages with long literary traditions. (gk)

Ochs proposes a retention (versus replacement) model of acquisition of language in which not all language strategies learned in childhood are replaced by new strategies learned in adulthood. Rather, in casual, spontaneous, or unplanned speech, Anglo speakers rely more on morphosyntactic structures and discourse strategies acquired in the first three or four years of life. In planned language, the speaker draws on knowledge acquired or learned later in life. (cva)

The author analyzes samples of speech and writing from one adult male university graduate. He finds:

1. The proportion of long T-units is greater in the written than in the spoken sample.
2. The proportion of T-units containing dependent clauses is significantly greater in the sample of writing than in the sample of speech.
3. Gerunds, participles, attributive adjectives, passive constructions, and modal and perfective auxiliaries occur more often in the written than in the spoken sample of language. (jl)

Defines syntactic complexity as length of minimal syntactic units as well as the number of sentence-combining transformations and finds that, at the third-grade level, spoken discourse is more complex than written, but that the converse is true by Grades 5 and 7. (cva)

Olson says, “The purpose of this paper is to examine the consequences of literacy, particularly those consequences associated with mastery of the 'schooled' language of written texts.” Throughout the paper, Olson contrasts informal oral-language statements (utterances) with explicit, written prose statements (texts). (jl)

Olson questions the naive literacy bias of our schools, which assumes that everything can be taught best through books. He shows that different means of acquiring knowledge affect the picture of the knowledge acquired. The language of literacy is well-suited to such subjects as law, science, and literature, but i11-suited to such things as social relationships and practical learning. The language of autonomous text does not represent common sense knowledge, the mother tongue of the child coming to school, nor the language of the lower classes. (jl)

Olson compares written textbooks in literate societies to ritualized speech in oral societies and concludes both serve a similar purpose: to present what society considers true and valid knowledge, and thus to preserve the social order. The form in which texts are written is impersonal, objective, precise, logical, and explicit, which gives them a transcendental quality. The authority of texts derives from this transcendental quality, and from the fact that they represent society's approved version of true and valid knowledge. (j1)

Outlines the perlocutionary (social) as well as locutionary (logical) uses that cut across the modes oral/written so that conversation and ritual speech in oral societies, and written texts in literate societies all serve an archival function, forming a similar register in different modes. (cva)

Ong analyzes the effects of writing on the personality, thought, and social structures of people. He describes and contrasts the traditional oral approach and the literate approach to the world. (jl)

Ong characterizes oral culture, literate culture, and “secondary oral culture” (the present electronic age), and discusses some of the interactions among the three. (jl)

Memory of experience is not organized as narrative. The time that narrative creates out of memory is related in various ways to existential time. Oral noetic structure is largely formulaic, with plots that are not essentially climactic or linear, but rather showing considerable disregard for temporal sequence, getting to the action and then explaining how it got that way.

As writing and print enable knowledge to be stored outside the mind, memory is altered. The mind adjusts to the written form and organizes memory in the same fashion as a school book or newspaper article. Organization of narrative in one-to-one discourse and referent order is not natural as a mental operation; it is conditioned by print. (gk)

Philips makes the general point that each minority or non-Western cultural group, that adopts literacy from the outside, will have different responses and uses for it. She describes briefly the culture of the Indians on the Warm Spring Reservation in Oregon, pointing out the beliefs and advantages that are associated with the desire to keep words spoken, not written, for them. She explains the failure of public education and of VISTA to promote literacy as due to an ethnocentric attitude which does not take the Indians' needs into account. (jl)

Suggests that, contrary to Blankenship (see above), there are consistent differences between oral and written language from the point of view of code elaboration theory. Four indexes are considered:

• Structural complexity (sentence length, embedding)
• Language elaboration (prolixity, especially of quantifiers)
• Verb complexity (complex verb stems and adverbs)
• Personal reference

Because the indexes overlap, the results are not conclusive, but generally Poole finds that writing is characterized by greater sentence length but

• lesser structural complexity
• greater elaboration
• greater verb complexity and
• less personal reference. (cva)

Postman challenges the high value placed on reading in Western education. He says that print is an old technology incapable of generating revolutionary ideas or behavior. (jl)

Rader disagrees with Kay's definition of autonomous language as being minimally dependent on the contribution of background information by the hearer, giving imaginative fiction as evidence for her disagreement, since it is maximally dependent on shared background information. Rader contends that a complete correspondence between oral and nonautonomous and written and autonomous language does not hold. (cva)

Riesman deals in a very general way with three questions: “First, what are the differences between cultures which depend entirely on the spoken word and those which depend on print; second, what will be the significance of the written word now that newer mean media … have developed; third, what is likely to happen in those countries where the tradition of books is not fully established and where the newer media are already having a decisive impact” (3). (jl)

Characterizes the differences between oral and written language in terms of the very distinct types of language experience they represent for a child learning to read. Thus, the transition to literacy for a child involves more than the use of “oral comprehension skills and decoding.” (cva)

This experimental study tested the retention of material by providing a paraphrase or semantically changed form after an interval of 1 to 23 seconds, using both aural and visual presentation. No significant differences in retention were found. In both modes, paraphrases were not detected after a brief time, that is, neither mode engages long-term memory. (cva)

There are differences between oral and written English which entail differences in the skills and knowledge necessary to comprehend them. These differences are traced, surveying the literature in a variety of fields, considering three categories of differences: the physical nature of speech and writing, their use, and the characteristics of the language generally found in them. (pp)

The bits of talk and behavior produced by other than the main speaker in the achievement of discourse in conversation should be analyzed together with the main discourse. To treat such tokens--vocalizations like uh huh, mm hmm, yeah, or head gestures such as nods--in the aggregate, separated from the talk immediately preceding them, loses both the function of the tokens as well as the character of the ongoing talk during which they have been produced.

The most common usage of these tokens are as continuers, which pass by an opportunity to produce a full turn at talk, or as signals of understanding or agreement, which pass by an opportunity to initiate repair or subsequent disagreement. (gk)

Talk in all contexts is timed to an underlying tempo. Speakers time their entrances according to the tempo of preceding speakers, then optionally, change the tempo, either accelerating or retarding it. Tempo, which gives an account of immediate past and the basis for predicting the immediate future, is the bond that allows two or more speakers to move together in conversation, forming a rhythmic ensemble.

There are frequent communication problems between institutions, such as schools, the judicial system, and federal agencies and people who do not share assumptions about the nature of discursive practices within those institutions. Institutions are best regarded as conventionalizations of ensemble. They are necessary to make nonface-to-face communication work. (gk)

The authors caution the reader that neither literacy nor oral culture are monoliths--that literacy covers a wide variety of types, from essayist to letter-writing, and that oral culture, in fact, refers to many particular and varying oral cultures. The subjects of their study, the Northern Athabaskans, have an oral tradition “that is distinctly unlike the 'bard and formula' oral tradition which the literature has led us to always expect.” They suggest seeing different types of interactions on a focused/nonfocused, rather than an oral/literate, continuum. (jl)

Explores the possible interconnections between social inventions and cognitive development, and the possible psychological consequences of writing. Premise: writing, which objectifies the spoken language and creates new symbolic languages for man to manipulate, makes possible the attainment of new higher level of conceptual thought. Scribner traces the above premise through social science and psychological literature and discusses at length the relationship between thought and schooling. (pp)

Reviews research on the dispute of whether or not traditional and industrialized peoples use the same logical processes. Since the acquisition and use of logical genres often takes place through some institutionalized learning situation, this is related to the issue of orality and literacy. (cva)

This article compares social and cognitive features of formal and informal education.

The authors combine anthropological fieldwork with experimental psychological methods to examine reading and writing practices and their intellectual impact. They challenge Havelock's, Goody and Watt's, and Ong's speculations about the cognitive consequences of literacy. Most dominant theories of writing, they say, are based on expository texts, that is, school-based texts, thus confusing the effects of schooling with those of writing. The authors examine literacy among the Vai, and describe conclusions similar to those in “Literacy without schooling” (see below). (jl)

The authors disagree with the conclusions of Greenfield and Olson that literacy promotes abstract and logical thinking, and point out inadequacies in their method: vagueness, developmental bias, and confounding literacy with schooling. In their own study, they isolate the effects of literacy from those of schooling by studying the Vai, African people who practice and transmit their own form of writing without any formal schools or teachers. The authors “did not find that literacy in the Vai script was associated in any way with generalized competencies such as abstraction, verbal reasoning, or metalinguistic skills” (157). They did find that literacy skills in Vai were associated with higher ability to analyze oral speech phonologically and with higher ability to give clear instructions. They suggest that while literacy skills do transfer to other skills, the range of these other skills is limited and closely related to the literacy skills.

This article describes one child's language development between two and three-and-a-half years of age, as shown in recorded sessions of the child conversing with his mother about certain dictionary pictures. The premise of the article is that what children say when describing a pictured event is a function of their general knowledge about categories of information that need to be included for an adequate representation of some set of similar events, and the specific information content relevant to each specific event. It is further claimed that both these levels of knowledge result from conversational interaction with knowledgeable adults.

Compares the favored strategies of two cultures by examining naturally produced narratives (the Pear stories) about a movie. Finds that Greek speakers favor a strategy with some of the characteristics of a restricted code, while American speakers of English favor one with characteristics of an elaborated code (Bernstein 1972). It is emphasized that these favored rhetorical forms may actually be reversed in other settings; that is, that these strategies, while favored, are context bound. (cva)

Tannen begins by summarizing past research on oral versus literate traditions, then posits an oral/literate continuum to replace the dichotomy. She discusses implications of the oral/literate continuum in cross-cultural communication between:

1. Natives of different countries (Greeks and Americans)
2. Natives of the same country but of different ethnic or geographic backgrounds (Jewish and Greek Americans, Americans from New York or California)
3. Women and men.

She shows how the distinction between oral and literate strategies can explain differences in storytelling and conversational style in the three groups. (ma)

Concisely enumerate characteristics of oral/literate traditions and their manifestation in the areas of indirectness, storytelling, and conversation. An important point is made that the strategies associated with these traditions are not isomorphic with orality and literacy themselves.

Tannen suggests that the differences between spoken and written language that have been pointed out in previous work result not from the modes themselves (face-to-face conversation versus expository prose), but rather from the communicative goals of those discourse types. She also demonstrates that both modes make use of lexicalization and paralanguage to establish cohesion. Finally, she suggests that oral strategies may “underlie successful discourse production” in both modes. (cva)

Tannen's analysis of the spoken and written versions of the same narrative yields two main findings: (1) features that have been associated with oral discourse are found in written discourse, and (2) the written version of the narrative combines syntactic complexity expected in writing with features that create involvement expected in speaking. Since both literary language and ordinary spontaneous conversation focus on subjective knowledge and interpersonal involvement, they share some devices previously considered to be purely literary. (cva)