One of a series of semi-annual reports, this publication contains 23 articles which report the status and progress of studies on the nature of speech, instruments for its investigation, and practical applications. Articles are as follows: "Phonological and Articulatory Characteristics of Spoken Language" (Carol A. Fowler);…

Problems in the translation of Judeo-Spanish texts go beyond the problems normally associated with translation. Aside from near-native control of two languages, the translator must have knowledge of vocabulary that is not completely Spanish and an understanding of the unique orthographic history of the Judeo-Spanish dialect. There are Spanish…

The role of the Hebrew language as a cohesive force and the history of modern Hebrew instruction are chronicled. It is proposed that despite the scattering of its speakers and periods of use only as a literary or business language, Hebrew has been a binding force for the Jewish people. It was with considerable struggle that Hebrew gained…

This project extended the application of a model for development of semi-direct tests of oral proficiency, originally developed for Chinese, to a diverse set of less commonly taught languages spanning various language families and representing diverse cultural backgrounds. This second, final report covers development of tests for Hebrew, Hausa,…

A study conducted as part of a year-long Hebrew-English translation workshop in Israel focused on the development of students' ability to deal with cases in which the unmarked equivalent of a source-language string was a single lexical item. Subjects were 8 native English-speaking students, 8 native Hebrew-speaking students, and 12 professional…

Modern Hebrew is an excellent example of a national language, an indigenous language that its speakers view as uniquely related to their common history, values, and identity. Hebrew was a unifying factor for millenia before the rise of modern national movements. When the movement for the restoration of Jewish political self-determination arose,…

This paper examines the aspects of teaching the structural and semantic functions of the article in English. Writing samples from native Chinese- Japanese- Korean- Spanish- Farsi- French- Hebrew- Greek- Bengali- and Arabic-speaking ESL students illustrate the problems that exist in understanding the use of the determiner. Students are not aware of…

Reports on an experiment conducted on 23 Israeli kindergarteners and 16 Israeli college students, which used a variant of a semantic differential test in order to test the hypothesis that young Israeli children, like adults, ascribe sexual meanings to words without regard to grammatical gender. (Author/AM)

Different uses of numbers in natural language and mathematics is argued to have consequences for children's learning of numbers and for primary-grade textbooks. A study using particular properties of Hebrew indicates a crossing of the two language systems in children's reading of an arithmetic textbook. (MNS)

When a test is translated from a source language to a target language, the result is generally not two psychometrically equivalent tests. If the sources of differential item functioning (DIF) across languages could be predicted, this could have important implications for test adaptations. This study examined item revision as a tool for improving…

Discusses the establishment of a morpheme-per-utterance (MPU) index as opposed to the standard mean-length of utterance (MLU) for measuring the linguistic proficiency of two- to three-year-old Hebrew speakers. (EKN)

Presents a longitudinal study of six children which investigates the relationship between language development and the development of nonverbal representation. Concludes that the results suggest an interrelational hypothesis and proposes an interpretation in terms of reciprocal interaction between the two parameters. (Author/MES)

Compares the dependence of Hebrew-reading children and adults on graphemes and their translation to phonemes while reading. Concludes that when written Hebrew words are being named by both children and adults, their graphemes are phonemically recorded, with the effect being more pronounced in children. (AEA)

Examined whether letter names, which bridge the gap between oral and written language among English speaking children, have a similar function in Hebrew. In findings from studies of Israeli kindergartners and first graders, children were found to rely on letter names in performing a number of letter saying, spelling, and word recognition tasks.…

Summarizes existing research on the use and teaching of learning strategies, and presents six situational case studies of strategy training. A research-based strategy training model is proposed, as well as other instructional ideas for strategy training in the second-language classroom. (116 references) (Author/CB)