Four conference papers on discourse are included. In "How Context Contributes to the Interpretation of Temporal Expressions," Carlota S. Smith provides a summary analysis of the temporal interpretation of English sentences. Many sentences are shown to be semantically incomplete; it is argued that information from neighboring sentences is…

Focusing on the acquisition of semantic features and the relation between semantic and perceptual features, this study further tests the "semantic feature hypothesis," where a child acquires full adult word meaning component by component, and its complementary "correlation hypothesis," which claims that the source of these semantic features lies…

Conceptual and syntactic strategies in reading a foreign language are considered with attention to the functioning of the sentence parser. Topics of analysis include: the theoretical background and the educational relevance of the question of strategies; a study of the relative importance of the two parsing principles (syntactically guided…

A study is reported relevant to the relationship between first words learned by children and gestural symbolization under a variety of contextual conditions. It is part of a larger longitudinal study of 32 children at 10, 13, 20, and 27 months of age. The children were seen in three standardized situations for eliciting gestural and vocal symbols:…

One hundred and twenty kindergarten and second grade children from 3 different language environments (40 Mexican Spanish-speaking children from Monterrey, Mexico, and 40 Chicano Spanish-speaking children and 40 English-speaking children from the same public elementary school in Houston, Texas) were given a perceptual matching test and a verbal…

The study was designed to test the effects of a limited amount of sentence-combining practice on the syntactic development and overall writing ability of foreign students. Participants were freshmen studying English as a second language during an eight-week period. Twenty-four students were divided into a control and an experimental group. The…

Studies were conducted to help determine criteria for describing the stages through which second language learners pass as they acquire a new language. The ability of 24 beginning adult students of English as a second language to supply ten morphemes in obligatory contexts was predicted on the basis of contrastive analysis between English and each…

The goal of this study is to discover the phonetic difficulties encountered in the acquisition of French as a second language by English-speaking children. The children are studying French in a total immersion situation without benefit of structural exercises or special French language laboratory classes. Of particular interest here is the extent…

The present paper reports on a case study investigating the acquisition of form and function of the English progressive by a seven-year-old Hebrew speaker, learning English as a second language. The paper describes the different elicitation techniques used, and discusses the suitability of such techniques for the investigation of form and…

This report describes the use of the English negative by three adult second language learners, and relates the findings to Schumann's "pidginization hypothesis." This hypothesis states that a particular subject's restricted English was the result of his social and possibly also his psychological distance from English speakers. In order to provide…

Asserts that humanities computing techniques and methodologies remain marginal to mainstream literary scholarship. Argues for large scale analyses of text databases that would incorporate a shift in theoretical orientation to include greater stress on intertextuality and sign theory. (CFR)

This study investigated whether top-down or bottom-up cognitive processing was more important in listening comprehension in large-scale English-as-a-Second-Language tests administered to secondary school students in Hong Kong over a period of seven years. Results suggest that bottom-up processing was more important than top-down processing in…

Infants under six months are able to discriminate native and non-native consonant contrasts equally well, but as they learn the phonological systems of their native language, this ability declines. Current explanations of this phenomenon agree that the decline in discrimination ability is linked to the formation of native-language phonemic…

A study investigated lexical decision-making among Dutch-English bilinguals in the auditory modality. Subjects, bilinguals at three proficiency levels (intermediate, high, and near-native) were presented with 40 cognate and 40 non-cognate word pairs, a similar number of English and Dutch distractors, and a similar number of nonsense words in each…

The best way to teach writing is to make it the way to learn something else. Instructors need to look at written communication as it is used in real life. When students take pains with their writing, it is because what they have to say is important to them. The students' need to communicate a particular meaning for a particular purpose guides them…