The strategy of "transfer" of native language (NL) items into target language (TL) expressions is considered here to be an active learner strategy dependent on the learner's notion of "distance" between the NL and the TL. Some NL items will be more liable to transfer than others to the extent that they are believed to be less…

This is a summary of a workshop on teaching second language vocabulary. The following were discussed: (1) the need to teach vocabulary in context; (2) the need for vocabulary selection; (3) active vs. passive vocabulary; (4) the presentation of meaning (including denotation, connotation, idioms, and cognates); (5) the rate of vocabulary…

This paper is an attempt to summarize as explicitly as possible certain empirical findings of classical biosystematics and modern semantic ethnography which may be considered to represent formal universals of human mental structure. The paper offers a formal treatment of the subject of taxonomy, and an application of the formalism to several…

Discusses the usefulness of earlier, neglected linguistic traditions in solving some of the problems faced by transformationalists today. (Text is in French.) (AM)

This guide to an audio-lingual approach to Latin instruction is intended to assist Latin teachers and English teachers with background in Latin to expand the English vocabulary and reading skills of pupils through the study of Latin roots, prefixes, and suffixes. The content of this guide to health vocabulary introduces students to Latin and…

Twenty 10th grade students participated in a study designed to identify differences in the ways developing writers use words to create written texts. Essays written by the students were holistically evaluated and then analyzed for the types and the number of lexical cohesive ties used and the nature of the grammatical subject, or focus, of each…

Studies of the acquisition of word meaning and the semantic features involved have been mostly confined to noun categories and polar adjectives. Investigation of the semantic categories underlying verb forms has implications not only for theories of child language acquisition but also for theories of semantic structure in general. Experimental…

The intent of this study was to examine the development of three aspects of preschoolers' private speech: coefficients of egocentricism, the extent to which speech regulates actions, and the syntactic and semantic structures of individual utterances. Forty-one randomly chosen preschoolers (26 females, 15 males) were placed in three age groups (3,…

Three studies tested the theory that long term memory consists of a semantically organized network of concept nodes interconnected by leveled associations or relations, and that when a stimulus is processed, the corresponding concept node is assumed to be temporarily activated and this activation spreads to nearby semantically related nodes. In…

This collection of papers from the Summer Institute of Linguistics contains the following articles: (1) "Texmelucan Suprasegmental Phonology," by C. H. Speck; (2) "Some Discourse Features in Siberian Yupik Eskimo," by D. C. and M. R. Shinen; (3) "The Particle t'ah in Slavey Discourse," by C. Harrison and V. Monus; (4) "The Point-Line Dimension in…

Because inexperienced or basic writers depend on the semantics of everyday spoken dialogue when writing, research on written composition and the developmental links between spoken and written language should be more accessible to the practitioners who teach writing to those students. A review of the literature supports the theory of a semantic…

THE EIGHTH-GRADE STUDENT PACKET OF THE NEBRASKA ENGLISH CURRICULUM BEGINS WITH A UNIT ON "THE MAKING OF HEROES, THE NOBLEMAN IN WESTERN LITERATURE" WHICH LEADS STUDENTS TO QUESTION WHAT MAKES A HERO, WHAT HE IS LIKE, AND HOW HE EXISTS IN LITERATURE. AFTER READING A NUMBER OF BRIEF SELECTIONS FROM SUCH WORKS AS "THE…

Recent research supports the theory that unskilled writers produce writing through the mediation of spoken language. That is, their writing contains inexplicit meanings, or semantic abbreviations, characteristic of conversations in which the listener is familiar with the situational and cultural contexts of the monologue. Two studies further…

In an incidental memory task, second, sixth, and tenth-grade students performed three orientating tasks on different subsets of items in a list of common nouns. In one condition (EPA), children judged words on the Evaluative, Potency and Activity dimensions of the semantic differential. In another condition (EEE) children made phonetic judgments.…

A major obstacle to the effective educational use of computers is the lack of a natural means of communication between the student and the computer. This report describes a technique for generating such natural language front-ends for advanced instructional systems. It discusses: (1) the essential properties of a natural language front-end, (2)…