Three types of processes occur in language learning, each intricately connected with the others. Social processes are the steps by which learners and target language speakers create a social situation in which target language communication is possible and desired. Linguistic processes are the ways in which assumptions held by target language…

A study investigating the independence of linguistic abilities from each other, specifically the separability of syntax and semantics and the autonomy of syntactic abilities, is described. In the study, 30 individuals with Alzheimer's disease produced spontaneous conversations, completed sentences eliciting 16 grammatical forms, and when possible,…

A study was conducted to determine how a reader identifies and represents the major topics in a text and their interrelationships. Subjects, 56 college students, read two texts one sentence at a time. Each text contained 12 paragraphs that discussed six attributes of two major topics. The paragraphs on one text were organized by attribute, while…

A study investigated at what point during eye fixations visual information is used in furthering the reading process. The study identified two aspects of information processing: registration, in which a light pattern on the retina triggers a pattern of neural activity in the visula cortex; and utilization, in which the registered pattern has an…

Some of the metaphors that continue to guide educators' ways of understanding classroom life and education research have conceptual boundaries and limitations. These metaphors are referred to as Cartesian in order to locate them historically and within a cultural setting. The first type of metaphor serves as a conduit of language, in which…

The relation definition theory proposed in this paper is explicitly different from previous semantic memory theories since it is the first to make a relation's definition the basis of semantic processing. The paper suggests that this relation definition theory successfully predicts relation similarity on the basis of one key primary assumption:…

The acquisition of visual information, which occurs during eye fixations, involves two processes: registration (visual information becoming available to the brain) and utilization (visual information being used to further text comprehension). Registration occurs at the beginning of a fixation, while at least four possible patterns describe the…

A study examined the differences between the processes involved in analytic and summary writing by contrasting student writing of both kinds. Twenty 11th graders, 10 high and 10 average ability writers, participated in two composing-aloud sessions. In one session, the student wrote an analytic essay about a history passage and, in the other…

A study investigated the inferential processing involved in the comprehension of a class of complex predicates (such as "remember to,""manage to,""fail to," and "neglect to") that are known as implicative. The subjects, 64 college students, were timed while they drew inferences from syntactically affirmative…

Addressing the question of how schools and teachers can foster an advanced level of reading awareness among secondary students, this paper focuses on the similarity in language used to describe recent research on both the composing process and comprehension as acts of constructing meaning. It presents a perspective on the reading/writing…

This book concerns a neglected aspect of the education of bilingual children, namely, their potential desire and ability to learn to read before age 5. The basis of the study is considered in the chapter on children as early learners, which provides accounts of children being taught to read from the age of 6 months to 4 years. The next part of the…

Two studies investigated the processing of metaphor, specifically (1) the extent to which metaphor is processed similarly to literal language and (2) the effects of the presence or absence of a specific context on processing. In the first study, 82 college students listened to one of four taped lectures, each containing 22 metaphors. The tapes…

This research characterizes how the mental lexicon functions during sentence processing. In sentence processing, access of meaning is seen to be dependent on interaction between syntactic and semantic information within the sentence. It had been previously thought that meaning had been located in an independent mental lexicon. Three experiments…

The present paper describes results of a study that investigated 209 bilingual Puerto Rican college students' ability to solve verbal deductive reasoning problems administered in Spanish and English in relation to their reading comprehension skills in either language. A series of confirmatory factor analyses revealed that the data on reasoning and…

Issues concerning the teaching of sign systems to severely communicatively handicapped persons are considered. It is explained that the differences causing severe communication handicaps will affect which aspects of language processing and which aspects of language will be affected. Suggestions are made as to why some individuals who have great…