Examines the nonstandard constructions in Caipira Portuguese, a dialect spoken in southeastern Brazil, which illustrate a tendency to reduce morphological redundancy at the noun phrase level. This is accomplished by restricting plural markers to only one of the elements of the noun phrase--not the noun, as might be expected, but, rather, one its…

Discusses the production of anomalous sentences by non-native students of the Japanese language and suggests that the primary cause of various errors indicated in such sentences is the confusion with English "when." In addition, it is suggested that error analysis can help clarify the nature of grammatical problems and facilitate learning of…

Reports three studies which explored relationships between prototypicality and sentence structure in recall, preference ratings, and natural dictionary definitions. The results can be explained in terms of the sensitivity of sentence production processes to the lexical or conceptual accessibility of prototypes. (Author/AMH)

To determine if college students (n=345) attribute different meanings to specific grades (depending on the nature of the grading system used), three grading systems were compared: competitive, mastery, and growth. In addition, students were asked to rate the meaning of a specific grade ("A,""B," or "C") in the context of one of the three grading…

Describes a study that determines if an interrelationship exists between cognitive level, gestural development, and spoken English development in five hearing-impaired preschool children. Results suggest that a deaf child's cognitive development may be related to his/her communicative ability, especially in terms of pragmatic-semantic…

Considers the acquisition of native language and foreign language as complementary aspects of one basic cognitive-affective schema, interacting and conflicting with each other in a variety of ways. In addition, an illumination of the psychological processes impinging on one can shed light, in a reciprocal way, on the other. (SL)

Examines coherence between sentences in a paragraph, arguing that readers require coherence at this level as well as between paragraphs. Discusses continuative and discontinuative relationships between sentences, including (1) sequence, (2) exemplification, (3) addition, (4) replacement, (5) contrast, and (6) alternation. (HTH)

Surveys communications theory and discusses its application to educational organizations. Topics examined include definitions of communication, the evolution of communication models, concepts of language and semantics, interpersonal communication, and organizational communication. Finally, analytic techniques and conceptual frameworks are…

An often-neglected aspect of daily language is syllable doubling or repetition, as in infant language ("nounou"), onomatopoeia ("ronron"), interjections or responses ("oui oui"), names ("Mimi"), or military slang ("coco" for "commandant"). The mechanisms and semantic functions of this phenomenon are outlined, drawing on examples from French…

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…