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)

A study shows that word shape information, when combined with knowledge of the syntactic and semantic structure of the passage being read, more often than not specifies unique words among all of the alternative high frequency words of English. (MKM)

Critically reviews studies related to readers' anticipation of semantic, syntactic, and spatial features of text in the light of current theories of reading. Concludes that the class of interactive models, which conceive simultaneous bottom-up and top-down processing, are most consistent with available evidence. (AA)

Uses the eye-voice span to investigate the extent to which readers use syntactic or semantic cues to control segmentation during reading. Results are interpreted as favoring a semantic integration model in which skilled readers pace their information intake in order to facilitate integration of that information. (AA)

Comprehension of a sentence entails constructing a particularized and elaborated mental representation, and this process depends more heavily on knowledge of the world and analysis of context than is generally appreciated. Existing associative or semantic network theories would be strained to accomodate this data. (Author/BJG)

How well items of information which comprise a text are learned may depend upon the semantic and syntactic relationships (ideational bonds) which exist among those items. To determine if the ability of learners to recall text information is influenced by the location of the information within the text and by syntactic contrasts among informational…

Discusses experiments that investigated the sources of knowledge that are employed in spoken word identification. The interactive assumption that normal spoken word identification processes require the presence of semantic and syntactic context and the special status given to word-initial acoustic-phonetic information in cohort theory were…

The cloze technique is very flexible and can reinforce reading skills and encourage writing. (JH)

Beyond the first several thousand most commonly used words in a language, direct vocabulary instruction is not efficient. Use of inferential skills then becomes the most effective way of learning new vocabulary; it is the way native speakers build their 60,000 word vocabularies. Because the skill is not automatically transferable, it must be…

Discusses the occurrence or nonoccurrence of the contraction of prepositions and determiners in German to emphasize that the communicative function of certain syntactic forms can only be understood, and should therefore only be taught, within the framework of contextual analysis. (CB)

Research supported by grants from the National Institute of Mental Health and the National Science Foundation. (DD)

Presents five principles for restructuring classroom activities to obtain a maximum amount of oral language. Claims that by expanding children's oral language, their semantic and syntactic cuing systems to print will also be strengthened. (FL)

Defines and illustrates the importance of lexical function in second language learning based on the "meaning-text" model of I. A. Mel'cuk. Examples in French and in English demonstrate that it is possible to combine lexical and grammatical learning. (DJD)

In order to test hypotheses derived from the concept that grammatical, syntactic, semantic, and contextual cues affect the degree of reading comprehension in a visual display, the present investigation was undertaken using the French language. The subjects were approximately 30 college students in a second-semester elementary French course. Five…