This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 17 titles deal with the following topics: oral language characteristics of college freshmen; the language development of a modern day "wild child"; children's understanding of relational terms; the relationship of linguistic sexism and the relative status of males and females; linguistic characteristics of the careful speech of recent high school graduates; children's understanding of the minimal distance principle in English; the moral reasoning levels of secondary and college students; a comparison of English and Spanish oral narratives; language facility and aging; a theory of sentence comprehension based on psycholinguistic research findings; children's development of some temporal parameters of speech production; the relationship between cognitive and linguistic structure; linguistic signals to ethnic group and socioeconomic class; the development of English phonology before the age of two years; children's attention to verbal and nonverbal cues; children's ability to make inferences from linguistic information; and gossiping in an urban American upper middle class setting. (GW)