The notion that a prerequisite for asking questions about new topic matter is some appropriate level of knowledge was tested. Learners with two levels of background knowledge using learning material with two levels of difficulty were studied. (SW)

Reports on a study which sought to identify and examine the effects of certain learning strategies--practice, monitoring, and inferencing--on second language learning. (AM)

Experiments were conducted to determine the effects of sentence contexts on word recognition and reading. The questions of whether context is predominantly facilitating or inhibiting and how automatic the influence of contexts is on word retrieval were investigated. (SW)

Notes that the grading and development of reading texts could be improved through the pinpointing of some linguistic landmarks in language development, discusses the selection and testing of language landmarks, and describes a study that tested children's knowledge of structures involving the word "although." (GT)

Children aged six and eight were required to recall transitive sentences, some with an animate actor and inanimate acted-upon element, and some with these reversed. It appeared that children prefer to put the animate noun first and this affects their choice of active or passive sentence voice. (Author/SJL)

Finds no differences in the degree to which adults and seven-year-old children generalized Spanish stress patterns, although the children showed less interference from English stress patterns than the adults. (Author/RL)

Presents a survey of opinions on the nature and usefulness of discourse analysis. The following topics are addressed: (1) discourse analysis and ideologies of power, (2) epistemological considerations, and (3) discourse analysis and interdisciplinary endeavors. (AMH)

Reports on an attempt to establish a research or "observation" base for a comprehensive list of English oral language errors that a student will most likely make as a result of coming from a Spanish speaking background. (DD)

Presents a language processing model that distinguishes four functional components of reading and listening: feature detection, primary recognition, secondary recognition, and rehearsal and recoding. Uses the model to describe and incorporate some recent research. (GT)

Field independence, visual analysis, and spatial visualization were investigated and social communication skills were assessed in two groups of 25 first graders (chosen for either high or low verbal ability). (Author/PHR)

Reports on research on the acquisition of adjectives vs inflectional endings in Italian children. Patterns resulting from a longitudinal study involving two children and an experiment involving 84 children are compared to patterns of adults participating in the latter experiment. (Author/AM)

Examines a corpus of narratives produced by preschool children, and focuses on differences among the three age groups with respect to: (1) complexity, (2) the relationship between story elements and the discursive context, (3) relationship between story elements and extralinguistic context, and (4) shaping of the narrative as story and as part of…

This study examined the relationship between external language behavior in the form of intensity of verbal interaction between the learner and his language environment and the effects of this interaction on language abilities as measured by language tests. The subjects were adult learners of English as a second language. (CFM)

A contrastive analysis should describe the different processes of conceptualization in the languages under consideration. Furthermore, a detailed semantic analysis of linguistic items should be undertaken to discover perceptual strategies which force the speaker to use these items. Research in psycholinguistics is valuable in these tasks. (DB)

This bibliography lists articles on bilingual education and elementary level French immersion programs for English-speaking children. (RM)