Points out that children must master a great deal of information about form classes, written conventions, and word referent relationships in order to understand what teachers mean when they use the term "word." (FL)

Reports on four experiments designed to compare the accuracy of the listener's memory for information associated with the thematic and nonthematic portions of sentences. Results are consistent with the identification of the nonthematic portion of a sentence as the locus of new ideas conveyed to the language recipient. (CLK)

The language learner necessarily masters literal reading before literary reading. In order to learn the language of poetry, first-year university students of English as a second language must gain competence with polysemy and association which are fundamental to literary reading. (CFM)

Strong instructions induced more interaction, resulting in better recall under intentional than under incidental instructions. Intentional instructions had greater impact on less efficient tasks and less effect on more efficient tasks. Maximum recall and efficiency occurred with simple instructions to read the passage. (Author/MV)

The psycholinguistic method of teaching reading stresses the use of the child's oral language ability and syntactic and semantic information. (JH)

A brief summary of this conference, focussing on foreign and second language testing, is given. Topics covered include: publishers' tests, semantic aspects of error analysis, factor analysis and language proficiency, learning style identification, the foreign language placement test of the U.S.A.F. Academy, assessment of language dominance, and…

Criticizes traditional methods of defining the syntactical complexity of utterances and proposes distinguishing the various types of subordination in the sentence as well as elements of continuity and discontinuity in discourse structure, with particular reference to child language. (Text is in French.) (CDSH/AM)

Reports on 5 experiments investigating the effect of blocking words according to semantic category on ordered recall in adults and young children. (Author/RM)

Tests given at the German Institute of the University of Stockholm to 32 Finnish students studying German revealed that both their native language and their Swedish interfered with their learning German, in about equal degree overall. The mother tongue, Finnish, caused more interference errors in pronunciation. (Text is in German.) (IFS/WGA)

The Japanese Keigo system is the whole of the grammatical rules related to expressions of respectful or pejorative feelings concerning all persons involved in speech acts. This article proposes a new approach to the problem of teaching this system at the elementary level. (CLK)

Although Japanese word order is considered flexible and can often be changed without causing semantic change, there is consistent regidity in the language, as explained here. (CHK)

This article explores the notion that the assumptions on which the process of linguistic analysis is based relate to linguistic universals. The kinds of universals that underlie the process and their role in it are examined. (CLK)

In Lithuania in the last decade of the 20th century, L. Jovaisa used the controversial term "educology" for the first time in the history of Lithuanian discourse about the educational process. Jovaisa introduced the term "Educology" in the books "Introduction to Educology" (1993) and "ABC's of Educology"…

This book examines how the underlying linguistic competence of second language (L2) learners is constrained by the same universal principals governing natural language. It is assumed that there is an innately given universal grammar (UG) which constrains L1 grammars, limiting the kinds of hypotheses that L1 acquirers entertain about the nature of…

This book examines children's acquisition of a first language, the stages they go through, and how they use language as they learn. There are 16 chapters in 4 parts. After chapter 1, "Acquiring Languages: Issues and Questions," Part 1, "Getting Started," offers (2) "In Conversation with Children," (3) "Starting…