Coverage of two Third World countries, Mexico and Lebanon, by "Time" and "Newsweek" magazines was analyzed by comparing the cultural differences in meanings attached to words used in the magazines to describe the two countries. Stories were collected about the countries from each issue of the magazines published in 1979. The…

Defining lexical familiarizations as devices by means of which an author gives a reader an understanding of newly introduced key lexis, this paper discusses familiarizations in content area textbooks. The various sections of the paper examine the following topics: (1) the forms taken by lexical familiarizations, including use of reader experience,…

An oral screening test administered by an adult to a five-year-old child was transcribed and analyzed. The test was chosen as an example of a referential communication task that is also a social communication task. The analysis demonstrates that a participant in communication assumes that the other participants are employing strategies for…

The specific concern in this study is to consider the nature, social significance, and consequences of syntactic variation in the question forms used by judges when taking guilty pleas from criminal defendents. Nine judges from a court of general jurisdiction in Arizona were observed and tape-recorded while presiding over several procedures that…

Children's ability to infer dominant or subordinate status of speakers from their requests was investigated. It was hypothesized that, for young children, syntactic indirectness, semantic softness, and a positive tone, in the absence of other cues, would serve as cues to indicate that a speaker is subordinate to a listener. Syntactic directness,…

More than 5,000 reading miscues by 96 eighth and ninth graders were analyzed in a study designed to define specific relationships among cue use and to extend research based on Kenneth Goodman's psycholinguistic theory to the secondary level. The students read two easy and two difficult passages orally and answered questions based on them. Each…

The standard dictionary definition of a metaphor--a word or phrase applied to an object or concept that it does not literally denote in order to suggest comparison with another object or concept--is inadequate in that it does not deal with whole sentence metaphors and that it provides no way of distinguishing between a metaphor and a semantic…

College undergraduates participated in a cost/benefit analysis and a speed/accuracy analysis of semantic priming in a lexical decision task. In both studies, half the cues were neutral and half were words from 30 semantic categories. Word targets were the category names, and nonword targets were derived from those names. The cue-word was valid 80%…

The eight articles in this journal issue focus on vocabulary skills. The topics covered are semantic feature analysis, the use of highway survival terms in a vocabulary list, making vocabulary interesting to secondary students, word lists, the use of newspapers in creating vocabulary lists, six strategies underlying effective vocabulary programs,…

It has long been said that there are an infinite number of English sentences. "This is the cat that caught the rat" is an Enqlish sentence. So is "This is the cat that caught the rat that stole the cheese.""This is the cat with white paws that caught the rat that stole the cheese" is unobjectionable as well. Since a…

Finnish visual verbs and the corresponding terms in English are examined to reveal similarities and dissimilarities in the two semantic fields on the basis of translation equivalence. The contrastive analysis describes how the vocabularies of two genetically unrelated languages interpret the visual activity of seeing and looking, and what kind of…

The oral reading errors of 15 second graders were analyzed to find out if strategies used by good and poor readers could be differentiated. Patterns of errors were identified, and it was found that good readers often used context cues, while poor readers relied heavily on visual-phonic information. It was also possible to identify good and poor…

To assess the success of third grade readers in segmenting written text into the ideational groupings judged appropriate by adult readers, 22 students were given two prose selections and told to mark each location where a good reader might pause or take a breath while reading a story out loud. Their pausal locations were then compared to those…

Experimental investigations of children's prose comprehension with special emphasis on the development of skills necessary for reading comprehension are examined in this paper. The research is discussed under four major headings which correspond to specific comprehension skills: identifying main ideas, understanding logical structure, making…

The Verbal Measure of Information Rate (VMIR) is a measure of information rate which reflects the elements, features, and changes in a complex environment. Subjects rated 14 bipolar adjective pairs to indicate an appropriate description of the learning situation or information load (simple-complex, novel-familiar). The measure was administered to…