A study investigated whether young children use sentence accent to mark new information as systematically as they have been shown to handle contrastive stress within naturally-occurring discourse. Data were drawn from the spontaneous conversations of a boy-and-girl twin pair with adults. The twins' speech was coded in carefully-defined categories…

A study investigated children's difficulty in learning color words and attempted to determine whether the difficulty was perceptual, conceptual, or linguistic. The subjects were 24 two-year-olds, half with knowledge of color words and half without, and a similar control group. The experimental subjects were given conceptual and comprehension tasks…

A list of linguistics-related holdings in the Middlebury College (Vermont) library is presented as an example of a well-developed library collection for an undergraduate linguistics program. The materials are listed under 10 headings corresponding to the best-represented subareas in the collection: linguistics, semantics, grammar (comparative and…

The acquisition of the metalinguistic abilities involved in ambiguity detection and resolution was studied with children. It is suggested that metalinguistic abilities may serve as potential test measures for facility in learning a second language. School children (ages 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, and 13) were tested for their ability to detect ambiguous…

Semantically congruous and incongruous sentences that varied in their syntactic complexity served as the contextual material in a study investigating the use of contextual cues in ongoing word recognition. The dependent variable was the time necessary to name target words that were preceded by the various context conditions. Subjects were 24…

This paper describes work that was done at Athabasca University as part of the "EduSource Canada" project. This work centered around learning object development based on pre-authored educational content. The major outcomes of the work were the development of an explicit semantic structure with strong educational focus for learning…

The purpose of this volume is to demonstrate that the fields of linguistics, dialectology, language education, and early reading would be well served by a word book of the Black English vernacular. Chapters are devoted to discussion of the social significance of a lexicon of Black English vernacular, the terminology of sex and lovemaking, religion…

In order to investigate the development of word-formation abilities, 3-, 5-, and 7-year-olds were asked to act out with toys, judge, and make up sentences containing instances of class extension. Some sample sentences are "Can you upside-down the clown?" and "Broom the spoon." Children dealt with such sentences in much the same…

Translating legal and bureaucratic language into plain, comprehensible English is not amenable to simple rules and procedures. Rewriting comprehensibly requires specialized knowledge about language and an awareness of a number of misconceptions and pitfalls. This paper discusses what not to do in rewriting, based upon rewritten documents presently…

A framework for a comprehensive theory of reading is presented in this paper. The framework consists of perceptual, semantic, and control systems. The perceptual and semantic spaces of the theory should not be confused with the terms "decoding" and "comprehension"; decoding and comprehension refer to ways in which those spaces…

A psychological basis for belief in human monsters is provided by the possibility of human aberrations, instinctive human fear and fascination for such prodigies, and the existence of barbaric tales ridiculing foreigners. The role of language as a cause for such belief is investigated, specifically in terms of folk etymologies for more or less…

A study examined the use of context clues in identifying unknown words embedded in three types of text (fiction, exposition, and science). Subjects were 24 eighth grade students who read three passages at the fifth grade level, each with four content words deleted from them and replaced with pseudowords. Context clues for these pseudowords were…

Restatement and paraphrase, and the syntactic operations that generate them, can serve as the basis for techniques involving explanation, and the production of new sentences in the second language classroom. The basic operations involved are known intuitively by the native speaker but must be taught and practiced if the ESL learner is to get a…

Forty-four junior high school students were randomly assigned to two vocabulary instruction treatments. One treatment used context-rich, three-sentence passages as sources for target word definition. The other, the semantic mapping treatment, entailed learning new words by identifying the similarities and differences with related, known words.…

A comparative analysis of the oral reading miscues of 20 average and above-average readers entering sixth grade was made in relation to syntax, semantics, and patterns of comprehension and grammatical relationships. Miscues generated while reading passages in science, social studies, mathematics, and literature were analyzed, and the relationship…