Previous research has shown that adults tend to narrow the meanings of words encountered in context, a process that has been termed instantiation. In the present study, 60 first and fourth graders selected pictures which best represented the meanings of sentences read to them. The sets of pictures included three examples of a target word in each…

After presenting a brief description of the principles of a story grammar, some experimental results are summarized to illustrate the power of story schemata in controlling recall. Specially constructed versions of four stories were used with second, fourth, and sixth graders and in a second experiment with adults. One version of each story was…

A sample of 500 misspelled words was drawn from compositions written by students in third, fourth, and fifth grade. Errors were analyzed to indicate the type of misspellings that occur in writing connected discourse, to identify phonemes that cause particular spelling problems, and to identify typical error patterns. Results indicated that most of…

Two exploratory experiments compared the way people with no experience in the use of computer systems write and carry out natural language procedures, natural language descriptions, and instructions expressed in an artificial restricted syntax language. The results suggest the there is no single "natural" way that people write simple plans and…

This paper reviews recent theoretical developments and empirical findings in the area of the development of word knowledge in children. Advances in both linguistic and cognitive theory are described and synthesized, and children's word knowledge at various stages of development is outlined. The point is made that asking meaningful questions about…

The Southwest Regional Laboratory (SWRL) communication skills lexicon, compiled for use in the development of elementary instruction, is a set of words used by children between kindergarten and sixth grade. Although the lexicon was originally derived from the most comprehensive and up-to-date sources available, the major studies on which the…

The Dutch deictics are typically given a locative analysis: the adverbial pronoun "hier" ("here") and the demonstrative "deze" ("this") are said to point near the speaker, "daar" ("there") and "die" ("that") to point far, with "er" (weak "there") and the article "de" ("the") left unspecified (Bech 1952:7). The present paper rejects this view,…

This paper attempts to develop some relatively well-defined notions that may be of use in descriptive semantics and in some areas of cognitive psychology. These notions are intended as explications of certain terms widely used in these fields such as semantic dimension, semantic feature, semantic space, category, conjunctive category, and sememe.…

Discusses the estrangement between etymology and modern linguistics, and concludes that a reconciliation between spatio-temporal linguistics and etymology must occur, because without it, both disciplines are doomed to inanition. (Author/AM)

Examines the inhibition of recall of list items when extralist items are introduced, and describes experiments which suggest that this is an expression of a more general inhibition phenomenon. (Author/AM)

By analyzing different language tests currently in use for elementary school children, the article criticizes psychometric means of evaluation and ideas about language and language acquisition resulting from psychometric evaluation. (Text is in French.) (CLK)

A model of natural language generation based on an underlying language-free representation of meaning is described. A computer implementation of this model, called BABEL, has been developed at Stanford University. It is able to produce sentence paraphrases which demonstrate understanding with respect to a given context. Available from Association…

The syntax of the relative clause in the Saraswat Brahmin dialect of Konkani, an Indo-Aryan language, has been Dravidianized because of the impact of the Dravidian Kannada language, operating through bilingual speakers. The Konkani-Kannada bilingual situation is described and an explanatory account of the syntactic change is given. (Author/CLK)

Describes an experiment in which the relationship between verbal utterances and communication structures are examined within a group structure. (Text is in French.) (AM)

A total of 40 lower- and middle-class kindergarten children were given a number of different tasks in order to measure the child's understanding and usage of grammatical rules of English and his ability to use language for effective communication. (ED)