Trait adjectives have both evaluative and denotative meanings. Evaluation of a trait varies with the context of other traits attributed to the person. The meaning-change interpretation suggests that denotative change in trait meaning underlies evaluative change. The evaluative-halo interpretation attributes context effects of single trait ratings…

Discusses the distinction between formal and contextual guessing of vocabulary in second-language learning. It is argued that formal guessing is more helpful and reliable than contextual guessing. (Author/VWL)

This study employs a lexical-decision task to investigate second- and fourth-grade children's use of semantic context in word recognition. Results showed that younger and poorer readers benefit at least as much from semantic context in word recognition as do older and better readers. (Author/JMB)

Examines English simple tenses in the context of pedagogical assumptions usually made about their meaning. Several meanings ascribed to the past and present tenses were essentially inaccurate. Each tense gained associated meaning from context, with a central sense of modal, rather than temporal or aspectual, meaning. (Author/CB)

A study investigated the combinatorial semantics of nouns and verbs in sentences: specifically, the phenomenon of meaning adjustment under semantic strain, in an effort to discover whether there are orderly processes of adjustment, and if so, to describe them. The study comprised three experiments. Experiments 1 and 2, tested the hypothesis that…

This paper explicates the various elements of language context, discusses how readers and writers use context to transact meaning, and uses examples from two elementary learning disability resource rooms to demonstrate the importance of providing natural language contexts for language instruction. The role of the speech-language clinician is…

An experiment is reported that uses cross-modal priming to look at the resolution of anaphoric reference. Subjects given a visual lexical decision test simultaneously with an auditorily presented sentence showed selective semantic activation of the pronoun's referent on the basis of the pronoun's lexical properties. This finding is discussed in…

Investigates young children's understanding of homophones in two different linguistic contexts. Results show that the linguistic context is an important factor in young children's understanding of word meaning. (six references) (GLR)

Examines implicit meanings and underlying assumptions evident in the word "native" as used in Canadian academic articles appearing from 1970-1980. Focuses on context elaborate, context explicit, and context implicit meanings. Concludes that writers and readers should have social responsibility to question labels they use, to understand attendant…

Regardless of the syntactic variation of the direct object "a" in Spanish, a great deal of semantic unity underlies its use. Argues that it carries an invariant meaning that is present in every use of the form, and, concomitantly, its absence before a direct object carries an equally invariant meaning within the systematic semantic structure of…

Spatial relationships represented by po + dative case in Russian may be analyzed as underlying locations. The directionality sometimes present in po + dative sentences is due to the cooccurrence of the directional (determined) verb of motion and not to an underlying relation goal. (SL)

The effects of contextual words upon the identification of test words in sentences were studied with 21 hearing impaired children (seven to 12 years old). Significantly more correct discriminations were made on congruous and neutral sentences than on incongruous sentences indicating that hearing impaired children use contextual cues. (Author/SEW)

This discussion argues that the development of children's definitions is shaped by a particular orientation to word meaning characteristic of literate language use. This orientation is marked by increased attention to the linguistic form of expressions. To test this argument, a study was undertaken in which eight common nouns, familiar to most…

Two experiments investigated sentence context effects on the naming times of sentence completion words by third-grade children and college students. The semantic acceptability of the word in the sentence context had a much greater influence on children's word identification times than adults'. (Author/CB)

A study examined whether a single subject methodology that provided for alternate exposure to contexts and definitions would provide results similar to an earlier study in which one group studied contexts while a second group studied definitions. (HOD)