This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 34 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) object conservation and receptive language in day care center infants; (2) the syntactic incorporation of linguistic units; (3) implicit theories of meaning in rhetorical criticism; (4) phonetic structure of fast speech in American English; (5) the relationship between age, sex, and the language of social regulation; (6) the development of word order in early child speech; (7) the relationship between students' sex-role stereotypes and their interpretation of exclusionary and inclusionary nouns; (8) the relationship between the metaphors used by managers and their effectiveness ratings; (9) segmental and suprasegmental features and lip and jaw articulators; (10) a speech act theory based interpretation model for written texts; (11) the role of language in the rational emotive education approach to test-anxiety reduction for sixth grade students; (12) the relationship between pupils' and teachers' ratings and the language achievement of fifth- and sixth-grade pupils; (13) a comparative study of two approaches for analyzing black discourse; (14) vowel intrinsic fundamental frequency in prosodic context; (15) studies in the relationship between distinctive features and acoustic cues; and (16) a description of the variance between the oral and written language patterns of a group of black community college students. (EL)