Two detection experiments were conducted with short lists of synthetic speech stimuli where phoneme targets were compared to syllable targets. Results suggest that phonemes and syllables are equally basic to speech perception. (Author/RM)

In this article, syntactic evidence is presented to show that the two functions of place adverbials in Chinese cannot be reduced to one, and that both functions must be considered as semantic primes in the semantic structure of Chinese. (CLK)

Reports on children's mastery of one type of sentence structure which is derivationally complex and which has been shown to be psychologically complex as well, given the criteria of both comprehension and acceptability to the native speaker. (HOD)

In a modification of the sentence-picture comprehension task (Chase & Clark, 1972), 70 university undergraduates verified sentence-picture pairs. The findings limit the generalizability of any linguistic comparison model; two different comprehension strategies were used consistently by different subjects, whose choices of strategy were predictable…

Investigates the relationship between memory for prose and the structural characteristics of the semantic representation proposed by Kintsch. Results extend the generality of Kintsch's model across a wide range of ages, and indicate that a proposition is more likely to be recalled when its superordinate is also recalled. (EJS)

Reports on an experiment designed to compare the linguistic ability of English-speaking students of French to that of native French-speaking students, through sentence repetition, in order to draw some conclusions regarding approximative grammars. (AM)

Basal readers are supposed to be easy for children to read, but sometimes their language is so unnatural that it's more confusing than helpful. (MKM)

An experiment is described that involved presenting sentences to the subject for study and then testing single words for recognition (the subject had to decide whether the test word was in one of the study sentences). A large priming effect was obtained. (Author/RM)

Two experiments are described in which reaction times for understanding target sentences or phrases in terms of a preceding context were measured. It is argued that both experiments can be accounted for in terms of contextually generated expectations. (Author/RM)

This research attempts to assess the effectiveness of primary school children from first-versus second-language schools in oral communication and to investigate the relationship between role-taking skills and communicational effectiveness by comparing the results of this research with those of an earlier one. (Author/RK)

The translation process is discussed from these aspects: (1) Natural translation by bilinguals, explained by a discussion of research in translation skills among bilingual children, (2) the requirements for good professional translation, and (3) a description of the curriculum at the University of Ottawa's translation school. (AMH)

The importance of contextual influences to conversational competence development is emphasized. Included are one or more significant adults whose systematic patterns of feedback teach children rules of conversation while providing guided practice in the use of these rules. The role of expansion is examined as one of the common patterns of feedback…

Two experiments examined characteristics of text that determine when a repeated noun has a clearly identified referent. Verbs and article modifiers appeared to influence whether a noun is merely a repeated word in a text, or whether it is redundant at the propositional level. (SW)

Research conducted in the Italian town of Pescasseroli revealed that cultural changes had provoked various changes in the local dialect. This dialect had been greatly transfored in the last 15 years by the modification or disappearance of old cultural models and the intrusion of new ones. (CFM)

Contrastive psycholinguistic analysis of second language acquisition was undertaken with bilingual students taught primarily in French and with bilingual students taught in both English and Spanish. Three types of contrastive comparisons are made on the results of production tests administered to students. (SW)