Providing a comprehensive survey of cutting-edge work on second language learning, this "Handbook," written by a team of leading experts, surveys the nature of second language learning and its implications for teaching. Prominent theories and methods from linguistics, psycholinguistics, processing-based, and cognitive approaches are…

Purpose: Children with specific language impairment (SLI) demonstrate significant language impairments despite normal-range hearing and nonverbal IQ. Many of these children also show marked deficits in working memory (WM) abilities. However, the theoretical and clinical characterization of the association between WM and language limitations in SLI…

Repetition is a central phenomenon of behavior, and researchers have made extensive use of it to illuminate psychological functioning. In the language sciences, a ubiquitous form of such repetition is "structural priming," a tendency to repeat or better process a current sentence because of its structural similarity to a previously experienced…

Reviews the research on how readers or listeners construct mental models of the situation a writer or speaker is describing. Narrative components and spatial models are discussed. (YP)

Compares the effects of audio and audiovisual presentation on young children's cognitive processing while explicitly controlling the amount and complexity of information. (HOD)

Intended to illuminate current understanding of how the reader's cognition and language and the text's structure affect the processing of prose, this volume contains articles written by educators, linguists, psychologists, and artificial intelligence experts on issues of comprehension research. The first part of the book examines reading…

More than 100 college students enrolled in a reading and study skills course participated in a study designed to show the effects of retrieval speed on adult reading comprehension. A microcomputer version of the Posner task was used to measure memory retrieval speed, and reading and listening comprehension were measured from McCall-Crabbs…

According to S. K. Langer, people create meaning through presentational and discursive symbolism. Presentational symbolism, Langer suggests, is an abstracted sense of experienced life, while discursive symbolism is a series of subordinating or coordinating positions that set in motion the relation of ideas and permits the discussion of causation.…

Four tests were chosen for a study that investigated the hypothesis that individual differences in aural comprehension might anticipate individual differences in general information. A composite of eight subtest scores from the Test of General Information (TGI) was used as a measure of students' general knowledge. The Listening section of the…

Two experiments were conducted to test the hypothesis that readers make inferences if those inferences are necessary for the reconstruction of the writer's model. Each experiment involved the same 42 subjects who read a series of short passages. The first experiment examined inferences pertaining either to the underlying global situation of a…

The study evaluated the relative importance of graphic and contextual information in the correction behavior of disabled fourth grade readers who were clinically diagnosed as poor comprehenders. Results indicated that poor comprehenders tended to be more cued to graphic constraints in the text than to semantic constraints. (Author/DB)

The study assessed how unilateral right hemisphere brain damage (RHD) affects processing of metaphoric aspects of word meaning. RHD stroke patients (N=25) performed similarly to left-brain-damaged and normal subjects in the automatic condition and when provided with processing strategies. Both brain-damaged groups had difficulty developing…

Examines the relationship of grade level to children's ability to make musical discriminations when elements are presented simultaneously. Utilized a brief instructional period, listening tests, and singing tasks. Results indicated significant differences between grade level, types of discrimination, and musical interactions. Includes statistical…

Since an author does not provide all critical information, a text is never fully explicit; it demands that the reader/listener supply missing elements in order to form a coherent and logical whole. A study was conducted to explore both the types of responses urban first grade students made when asked to predict a narrative ending and differences…

This paper reviews the conceptual confusion surrounding the concept "scientific thinking" (also known as "the proceses of science,""scientific processes,""inquiry skills," and sometimes, "the scientific method"). It begins with three separate arguments, each supporting a particular claim: (1)…