Examines recall of passages in order to determine relative importance of lines according to their function in argument. Results indicate that hypothetical assumptions and their logical consequences are less well remembered than facts and that facts introduced are better recalled than facts conducted in the course of an argument. (EKN)

Kindergarteners without number conservation ability were found to rely on the nonlinguistic strategy of choosing the greater amount in tasks requiring the choice of more and less. Mature semantic knowledge of "more" was found to precede that of "less." (Author)

Presents and analyzes two studies designed to test native speaker reaction to certain types of errors that speakers of English make when learning German. Aim was to establish the role of the medium, spoken or written, in evaluation of errors. Results show overall ratings of errors in written and spoken language are similar, although with…

Presents study designed to examine trait structure of a cloze test using confirmatory factor analysis. Results suggest that a modified cloze passage, using rational deletions, is capable of measuring syntactic- and discourse-level relationships in a text, and this advantage may outweigh considerations of reduced redundancy which underlie random…

Tests the hypothesis that mothers would label objects with adult-basic level terms when talking to other adults, but would label the same objects with child-basic terms when speaking to their young children who were just starting to talk, even though these labels may be very much "incorrect" by adult standards. (Author/RH)

Investigates the relationships between the occurrence of mazes (garbles, word tangles, or false starts), sentence complexity, and the use of connectives in 20 fifth-grade students. (HOD)

A language sample and television viewing log were collected from 93 preschool children to explore the relationship between viewing habits and spoken language. Findings showed a negative inverse relationship between language sophistication levels and television exposure, and suggested support for an environmentalist theory of language development.…

Results of a study of social cognitive ability and "requestive" performance of preschool children in dyadic interactions with peers revealed a significant effect of degree of familiarity on the frequency of verbal requests and a significant influence of the level of social cognition on the informational adequacy of the initial request.…

Discusses three experiments investigating the development of word-by-word comprehension in 5-, 7-, and 10-year olds. Subjects monitored for target words in a sentence. Variable included types of monitoring tasks and distribution and context of target words. Results are discussed in terms of the types of comprehension processes various tasks…

Argues for a dual approach to the study of second language acquisition, incorporating a nomothetic and a hermeneutic mode of inquiry. (Author/AM)

Delineates a study showing that jurors arriving at different verdicts differ in the way they compute verdicts from a common evidence base rather than in the structure of their evidence bases. Concludes that the legal system's distinction between evidence comprehension and verdict deliberation is a defensible one. (Author/FL)

Concludes that the training of elementary school teachers to increase the frequency of oral questioning behavior in ethnic group students diagnosed as weak in oral communication increases the oral expression of those students. (FL)

Five educational leaders--John Downing, Richard E. Hodges, Charlton Laird, Pose Lamb, and Roy C. O'Donnell--offer reflections on significant developments in research on language development during the 1970s and on their hopes for language research and instruction in the 1980s. (GT)

An experiment is reported comparing the pluralization patterns exhibited by American college students studying German with those of adult and child native speakers of German. Respondents' pluralization of 30 nonsense words did not reveal significant interference between English and German in this regard. (PMJ)

Describes a set of questionnaires administered to 400 French speakers in France and Switzerland to study variation in the position of the adjective in a noun phrase. The first objective was to separate rigidly structured contexts from those affected by fluctuations, the second was to detect regularities and hesitations in individual behavior. (MES)