Purpose: There is a substantial minority of children for whom lexical retrieval problems impede the normal pattern of language development and use. These problems include accurately producing the correct word even when the word's meaning is understood. Such problems are often referred to as "word-finding difficulties" (WFDs). This article examines…

This study examined language and reading ability in English monolinguals, Spanish monolinguals, and two bilingual groups at the beginning of kindergarten and at the beginning of first grade. The study also compared the family background of the children on home literacy, parent education, and the parents' aspirations for their children. In…

The current study is concerned with identifying racial-ethnic differences in cognitive strategies or structures that are related to performance on verbal ability tests. The study had two goals: (1) to compare the semantic equivalency of intelligence test items between racial-ethnic groups, and (2) to examine the relationships of individual…

This study considers the occurrence of noun plural marker deletion in black English. It questions the cause of the phenomenon and investigates four factors which could be involved: presence or absence of a quantifier expression, phonological constraints, age of the speaker, and interaction between quantifier expressions and phonological…

The experiment described in this report considers whether children who learn a second language will develop the same semantic system as monolingual children or whether their semantic system will be different because of linguistic or cultural interference, and also whether the bilingual child develops separate meaning systems for his two languages…

Hierarchies have been identified as determinants of constituent order. The set of such hierarchies is reviewed and ranked as determinants of NP sequencing in English. The effect of a hierarchy in other languages is compared to and contrasted with what is found in English. (Author/LMO)

Considers the implications of Yoruba as the Nigerian mother tongue for linguistic competence in French at the phonological, morphological, lexical, syntactic, and sociosemantic levels. (CB)

A study compared the effectiveness of three classroom methods for teaching semantic mapping to college-level learners of English as a foreign language (EFL). Subjects were 187 freshmen at an Egyptian university, randomly assigned to three treatment groups: teacher-initiated semantic mapping; student-mediated semantic mapping; and teacher-student…

Investigates the availability of syntactic cues to verb meaning. In Experiments 1-3, adult subjects' judgments of verbs' semantic similarity were compared with other adults' judgments about the syntactic properties of the same verbs. In Experiment 4, subjects paraphrased sentences formed by pairing verbs with unaccustomed sentence frames. (54…

The diagnostic discourse of medical students and physicians in thinking-aloud protocols on paper cases was analyzed for evidence of semantic structure. Results show that structural semantics can be used to distinguish various levels of mental processing among novices as well as between novices and professionals. (MSE)

This study compares the linguistic knowledge of adult second language (L2) learners, who learned the L2 after puberty, with the potentially "eroded" first language (L1) grammars of adult early bilinguals who were exposed to the target language since birth and learned the other language simultaneously, or early in childhood (before age 5). I make…

To determine formal principles of discourse processing and production, a study reviewed theories in various disciplines related to language and/or thought and thereby rationalized an approach of quantitative matrix analysis to the problems caused by discrepant discourse structures encountered in second language learning. Statistical analyses of…

A study investigated how text features influence the amount of vocabulary knowledge students acquired incidentally while reading expositions. Three sets of text features were identified from studies on comprehension: (1) features associated with the macrostructure, (2) features associated with logical and temporal relations in the microstructure,…

A study explored the use of a text-copying task for the determination of syntactic constituent structure. It was predicted that the task would be a naturalistic, reasonably direct, and sensitive psycholinguistic research method. In two experiments, 70 subjects wrote out copies of typed passages. The points where they paused and looked back to the…

This selective bibliography lists 16 books and 42 journal articles dealing with German-English contrastive studies. The entries range in data from 1952 to 1972 with the majority published since 1965. The books cited are German or American publications and the articles appeared in well-known European or American pedagogical language journals. (TL)