This qualitative study investigated written discourse in the form of personal letters written by ten people with aphasia following stroke and ten people with cognitive-language disorder as a consequence of traumatic brain injury, and compared their performance with 15 non brain-damaged writers. Personal letters perform the dual function of…

Resistance to interference from irrelevant auditory stimuli undergoes development throughout childhood. To test whether semantic processes account for age-related changes in a Stroop-like picture-word interference effect, children (3-to 12-year-olds) and adults named pictures while listening to words varying in terms of semantic relatedness to the…

In 4 experiments the authors used a variant of the picture-word interference paradigm to investigate whether there is a temporal overlap in the activation of words during sentence production and whether there is a flow of semantic and phonological information between them. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrate that 2 semantically related nouns produce…

Finnish has a very productive morphology in which a stem can give rise to several thousand words. This study presents a visual lexical decision experiment addressing the processing consequences of the huge productivity of Finnish morphology. The authors observed that in Finnish words with larger morphological families elicited shorter response…

This study investigated personal narratives produced by children with and without learning disabilities in the context of naturalistic conversation. The high-point analysis was applied to compare the referential and evaluative aspects of children's personal narratives. Participants were 60 students in Grades 4 and 5 in public suburban schools,…

Historians generally agree that causality is central to historical writing. The fact that many school history students have difficulty handling and expressing causal relations is therefore of concern. That is, whereas historians tend to favor impersonal, abstract structures as providing suitable explanations for historical events and states of…

The term autonomy has multiple meanings based on diversity in theoretical views in current educational literature. Examples are given of multiple meanings of autonomy, and comparisons are made to the Piagetian view of autonomy as self-regulation implying separateness within community. A case is made for the relevance of autonomy as an educational…

In two experimental training studies we examined the hypothesis that an emphasis on the meaning of a word is more effective than merely focusing on the orthography to increase reading fluency. Reading delayed children from Grade 1 (mean age = 7.3 years) and two groups from Grade 2 (mean age = 8.3 and 7.8 years) repeatedly read words while focusing…

Traditional models of human memory have postulated the need for a brief phonological or verbatim representation of verbal input as a necessary gateway to a higher level conceptual representation of the input. Potter has argued that meaningful sentences may be encoded directly in a conceptual short-term memory (CSTM) running parallel in time to…

In this article, the author demonstrates that the semiotic model proposed by Charles Morris enables us to optimize our understanding of technical communication practices and provides a good point of inquiry. To illustrate this point, the author exemplifies the semiotic approaches by scholars in technical communication and elaborates Morris's model…

We summarize some of the most important findings from research evaluating the hypothesized causes of specific reading disability ("dyslexia") over the past four decades. After outlining components of reading ability, we discuss manifest causes of reading difficulties, in terms of deficiencies in component reading skills that might lead to such…

Purpose: To illustrate the need for social network metadata within semantic metadata. Design/methodology/approach: Surveys properties of social networks and the semantic web, suggests that social network analysis applies to semantic content, argues that semantic content is more searchable if social network metadata is merged with semantic web…

Many studies have found that patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) perform significantly worse than normal controls on verbal fluency tasks. Moreover, some studies have found that AD patients' deficits compared to controls are more severe for semantic fluency (e.g., vegetables) than for letter fluency (e.g. words that begin with F). These…

This article brings together two independent lines of research on numerally quantified expressions, e.g. two girls. One stems from work in linguistic theory and asks what truth conditional contributions such expressions make to the utterances in which they are used--in other words, what do numerals mean? The other comes from the study of language…

Syntactic knowledge is widely held to be partially innate, rather than learned. In a classic example, it is sometimes argued that children know the proper use of anaphoric "one," although that knowledge could not have been learned from experience. Lidz et al. [Lidz, J., Waxman, S., & Freedman, J. (2003). What infants know about syntax but couldn't…