Describes an undergraduate course at the Open University in Great Britain that teaches software engineering. Highlights include the use of formal methods to interpret the programing language's syntax and semantics; the role of course software; home use of microcomputers for the course; and supporting course materials. (LRW)

Describes a list of attributes of instructional materials based on a review of instructional design literature that was validated and found reliable through a series of studies. Four categories of attributes are presented: (1) instructional design; (2) language, including semantic and syntactic structures; (3) presentation, including layout; and…

Ten students (ages 10-12) with severe written and spoken language difficulties were provided explicit instruction in phonological processing skills and semantic-syntactic skills. Results indicated that phonological and semantic-syntactic deficits could be remediated successfully, and improvement in these skills had significant positive effects on…

Examination of a new type of speech developing among students at the University of Yaounde reveals a highly coded usage that cuts outsiders off through the use of highly metaphorical, playful, and hermetic words that come from various sources and are reassigned different or refreshing meanings and the use of colorful expressions, word-blending,…

Important characteristics of lexical databases and their applications in information retrieval and natural language processing are explained. An ongoing project using various machine-readable sources to build a lexical database is described, and detailed designs of individual entries with examples are included. (Contains 66 references.) (EAM)

Evaluated the distinctiveness, independence, and relative time courses of the event-related brain potentials (ERPs) elicited by syntactically and semantically anomalous words. ERPs were recorded while subjects read sentences, some of which contained a selectional restriction violation, a verb-tense violation, or a doubly anomalous word that…

Examines development of verb structures in the multiword combinations of two Korean learners, starting from 15 months of age when both children produced their first word combination. (Author/VWL)

Presents the Semantic Vector Space Model, a text representation and searching technique based on the combination of Vector Space Model with heuristic syntax parsing and distributed representation of semantic case structures. In this model, both documents and queries are represented as semantic matrices, and retrieval is achieved by computing…

A study measured and compared the semantic and syntactic knowledge of 20 sixth-grade students with reading disabilities, 20 fourth-grade typical readers, and 20 sixth-grade typical readers. Results indicate that students with reading disabilities were better able to demonstrate knowledge of suffixed words in oral language measures than in reading…

Discusses second language acquisition and the use of multimedia that allows learners to be actively engaged in the language learning process, based on experiences at an Australian university teaching Chinese to English and Japanese students. Considers the phonological level, the semantic level, the syntactic level, and the discourse level. (LRW)

Describes a language generation system, which, given data files describing a natural language, generates utterances of the class the user has specified. The system can exercise control over the syntax, lexicon, morphology, and semantics of the language. This article explores a range of the system's potential applications to second-language…

Aspects of language that develop during the adolescent years are discussed in the domains of pragmatics, syntax, and semantics. Selected topics include complex conversational behaviors that adolescents employ, syntactic attainments associated with persuasive writing; and the understanding of proverbs and figurative expressions. Relevant…

In this article, the author stresses the importance of welcoming preschoolers and babies into school libraries. She states that when read to from birth, a baby becomes used to the cadences and rhythms of spoken language, at the same time responding to the bright pictures and the presence of a loving adult. The baby associates books and stories…

Williams syndrome, a genetic disorder caused by a microdeletion of approximately 25 genes on chromosome 7q11.23, is associated with mild to moderate intellectual disability or learning difficulties. Most individuals with Williams syndrome evidence a cognitive profile including relative strengths in verbal short-term memory and language, and…

The study examines one component of the system of complementation in Palestinian Arabic. It is argued that the complementizer in question has an inherent semantics capable of influencing the meaning of sentences in which it is embedded. Specifically, its presence in a complex sentence communicates modal meanings distinct from those communicated by…