Meaning construction is a complex concept that encapsulates language and thought as a whole system in which sense and meaning have a unique relationship highly marked by the social and cultural environment of the reader. Hence, Kichwa-Spanish bilinguals' reading practices in the Southern Andes of Ecuador cannot be discussed as two separate…

Public standing of a teacher is reflective of the customary social attitude towards the profession and associates with the efficiency of the professional practice. The dynamism of social processes determines the importance of defining modern criteria for the semantic categorization of teacher's public standing, differences in the perception of…

There is a crucial debate concerning the nature of chess chunks: One current possibility states that chunks are built by encoding particular combinations of pieces-on-squares (POSs), and that chunks are formed mostly by "close" pieces (in a "Euclidean" sense). A complementary hypothesis is that chunks are encoded by abstract,…

Reports on a study of how people create names for individuals characterized by role descriptions. Concludes that context scenarios that involved the individual denoted by a role description elicited names less literally based on the actual role description than did less involving scenarios, and that less literal names appeared to directly…

Results appear to indicate that the belief systems of the young child about the attributes of a stimulus person can be altered extensively by introducing characteristics completely unrelated to these attributes into the semantic representation of that person. (Authors)

Children's expectations regarding the roles played in society by different groups of people have been shown to significantly affect their comprehension of sentences. This paper reports on a study designed to examine the way children's expectations affect the strategies they employ in two tasks tapping the organization of the semantic system. Sixty…

Testing in foreign language classrooms is characterized by excessive preoccupation with students' ability to manipulate small grammatical features, while testing of communication is conspicuously absent. Furthermore, current testing is often done for the purpose of generating labels for students or for their post-instructional performance. This…

Discusses the discourse strategies that status-unequal interlocutors use in expressing disagreement. Reveals semantic formulas as influenced by the role relationships and compares and contrasts the discourse strategies used by native speakers of Turkish and American English for the same speech event in order to obtain a cross-culture perspective.…

Described are areas of speech and language which the speech pathologist must evaluate in the preschool screening process. Phonemic development, morphological development, syntax, and semantic development are discussed in terms of normal developmental stages and methods of evaluation. (LS)

Discourse strategies used by status-unequal interlocutors expressing disagreement are discussed. The paper focuses on the influence of role relationships on semantic formulas. A comparative study of discourse strategies used by native speakers of Turkish and North American English in the same speech event is also reported. Data were gathered from…