Relational-inference, a process associated with developmental change in performance on classification items, was investigated in two experiments. The accuracy and latency with which 20 subjects at each of 3 age levels (8, 11, and adult) stated relationships among concepts were tested. In experiment 1, 40 triplets of concepts related by a class…

In the writing of Matthew Arnold, integration, one great impression rather than many great individual lines, is the most important goal. In his essay, "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time," the "blocs" of his thought are in sets of two, three, or even four sentences: in effect, he writes much like a poet, in couplets,…

Three stages of teaching second language vocabulary are examined using examples of typical situations for Poles learning English. A basic assumption is that the vocabulary of any two languages, especially Indo-European languages, exhibits both ethnological and accidental similarity. The first stage is to make the phonic, or graphic, or both forms,…

Memory for sex of the speaker and language of presentation of a spoken message was high and reliably better when the features were instrumental for comprehending the message than when they were not. This suggests that the physical characteristics of an event may be deeply or elaborately encoded when they are meaningful in light of the task…

A study of rural Quebec's language showed that by comparison with the urban version, it is less influenced by anglicisms, and the borrowing that has occurred is not solely of terms of civilization designating objects or notions susceptible to exchange between anglophones and francophones in Quebec. Certain anglicisms seem to have become integrated…

This paper undertakes the study of the occurrence of non-corresponding demonstrative forms in Spanish, Basque and English in exactly the same linguistic context. It is proposed that the differences in the choice of the demonstratives result from the differences in the kind of information that must be coded in each of the languages. Thus, I will…

A group of students on a post-graduate teacher training course took part in a Reluctant Learner Project. On one afternoon a week for a term, each student took a small group of comprehensive school pupils from a low stream class out of school and engaged in mutually agreed activities. (Editor)

This paper examines aspects of variation in child language, and specifically how children express causal relations in complex sentences. Four particular types of variation were observed: (1) the order of clauses and the connectives used to link clauses; (2) mothers' causal statements; (3) interaction of language form and content, in the form of…

In early transformational generative grammar, it was assumed that all semantic interpretation would be done off deep structure, but with the proposals for the extended standard theory (EST) of Chomsky (1968, 1972) came the realization that certain aspects of semantic interpretation, such as focus and presuppostion and scope of quantifiers, must be…

This study manipulated the relations between target and cue words in two cued-recall experiments with children based on the assumptions that: (1) the target cue relations that are most consistent with a child's semantic memory organization result in the highest levels of recall, and that (2) the optimal target-cue relationships may change with…

Ethnographic semantics is that discipline which seeks to understand human cognition through an analysis of the cognitive content of linguistic expressions: that is, the systematic study of the meanings of words and the role of these meanings in cognitive systems. There are many misconceptions about the nature of ethnosemantics, however, and by…

A general observation about the vocabularies of most languages is that they tend to increase in size over time. Little is known about the causal mechanisms involved in this lexical expansion, but most anthropologists and linguists are in agreement that it probably mirrors general cultural evolution. The study of lexical growth becomes important if…

An attempt is made to overcome the shortcomings in Robinson's model of generative grammar by modifying her dependency rules and adding semantic specifications to the dependents of V, taking into account some of the considerations that led Fillmore to make up his cases. (Author)

A definition of the original meaning of "audiolingual," as coined by the author in the 1950s, with a plea for the reinstatement of that meaning. Classroom procedures based on the original concept are offered. (TL)

Proposes a methodology for teaching comprehension of a foreign language in both the reading and the listening domains. (Text is in French.) (TL)