Presents abstracts of a session that discussed cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) on the World Wide Web. Topics include CLIR research in Chinese-English, German-English, and Japanese-English involving machine translation, semantic indexing, domain concepts, integrating new technologies, large-scale multilingual lexicons, and international…

Investigates whether Spanish- and Turkish-speaking learners of English discover the semantic and syntactic constraints on the causative/inchoative alternation in the absence of overt morphological clues. Results of a picture judgment task show that second language learners do discover these properties and that overall verbs appear to cluster in…

Examined how skilled adult readers assign meaning to sentences. Of particular interest were sentences containing "experiencer" verbs, which describe states or emotions rather than actions. Subjects were university students in Australia. Test items were semantically implausible sentences. (Author/VWL)

Outlines a psycholinguistic model of vocabulary acquisition in a second language in an instructional setting. The model is based on an understanding of the representational characteristics of the second language lexicon. (Author/VWL)

Discusses linguistic imperialism related to the naming of Indigenous peoples of the Americas; confusion between race and ethnicity; linguistic inequality of indigenous languages; Eurocentric ideology and its relationship to hegemony; and implications for the unequal education of Indigenous peoples. Suggests that Indigenous peoples rename…

The problem of school disaffection appears to be particularly persistent with learners of English as a second/foreign language (ESL/EFL). These learners aspire to acquire the syntactic, semantic and cultural systems of the target language for various educational, communicative and social purposes. But statistics show that considerable numbers of…

Background: Research on the relationship between cognitive skills and mathematical problem solving is usually conducted on adults or on participants with acquired deficits associated with brain injury (e.g. Cipolotti, 1995; Cohen, Dehaene, & Verstichel, 1994; McCloskey, 1992). Aims: In these studies we wanted to make a contribution to the…

This study investigates the oral language skills of 8-year-old children with impaired reading comprehension. Despite fluent and accurate reading and normal nonverbal ability, these children are poor at understanding what they have read. Tasks tapping 3 domains of oral language, namely phonology, semantics, and morphosyntax, were administered,…

The typical college student is unable to deeply comprehend what he or she reads. Most students have few, if any, intellectual tools that would enable them to read deeply, and then apply what they have read. The "Critical Thinking and the Art of Close Reading" series (which includes this column and the past three columns) focuses on some of the…

Gaps in reading performance between Anglo and Latino children are associated with gaps in vocabulary knowledge. An intervention was designed to enhance fifth graders' academic vocabulary. The meanings of academically useful words were taught together with strategies for using information from context, from morphology, from knowledge about multiple…

Epistemic dialogues, involving explanation and argumentation, have been recognized as potential vehicles for conceptual understanding. Although the role of dialogue in learning has received much attention, the problem of creating situations in which students engage in epistemic dialogue has only begun to be addressed. This article highlights the…

The failure of inhibition hypothesis posits a theoretical distinction between implicit and explicit access in deep dyslexia. Specifically, the effects of failure of inhibition are assumed only in conditions that have an explicit selection requirement in the context of production (i.e., aloud reading). In contrast, the failure of inhibition…

Purpose: This study evaluates the extent to which bilingual children produce the same or overlapping responses on tasks assessing semantic skills in each of their languages and whether classification analysis based on monolingual or conceptual scoring can accurately classify the semantic development of typically developing (TD) bilingual children.…

This qualitative case study examined the Spanish linguistic needs of working health care professionals. Data from observation field notes, interviews, document analysis, and member checks were coded, triangulated, and analyzed following the premises of grounded theory. Results indicated that participants were able to produce routinely used words…

Taking its inspiration from a study conducted by Svalberg of Brunei English verb usage (1998), this paper examines the responses of a sample of 205 Filipino university freshmen to grammatically correct and incorrect verb forms in a 20-item Grammaticality Judgment Test. The test covered tense harmony, verb forms, tenses, and modals. Except in the…