A study examined the phoneme-grapheme correspondence in native English-speaking kindergartners' spelling and compared it to the results of similar research with Spanish-speaking children. It tested the hypothesis that English-speaking children make their first grapheme-sound correspondences differently because of phonological differences in the…

This study investigated the relative ability of literate (n=24), semi-literate (n=45), and non-literate (n=21) adults to erase the initial consonant or vowel from non-words and pronounce the remaining phonemes. It was hypothesized that difficulty in removing the initial consonant from the vowel with which it coarticulates is due not only to…

A study was conducted to provide a replication of the gaze duration algorithm proposed by M. A. Just and P. A. Carpenter using a different kind of passage, to compare the three gaze duration algorithms that have been proposed by other researchers, and to measure processing time in reading. Fifty-one college students read a passage while their eye…

A study investigated differential processing of adjectival and verbal passives in English, and the implications for linguistic theory. The subjects, 30 native-English-speaking college students, were presented with word triples in which one member was an adjective, one an adjectival passive, and one a verbal passive, and with three two-sentence…

This study explores how children indicate that a new character or object is being introduced into a written text and how they tell their readers that a particular word refers to something which has appeared in the text before. In particular, the study focuses on information represented by noun phrases in written narrative texts. To investigate how…

Comparison of language-impaired two- to three-year-olds (N=10) and normal one-year-olds (N=15) matched for expressive language revealed that the language-impaired subjects acquired a greater number of object concepts presented in a no-action condition than the normal children, although language-impaired subjects' extensions of the names to new…

Describes a study whose purpose was to identify the relative contribution of the nature of instruction and the frequency of encounters in bringing about word knowledge proficiency in fourth-grade children. Results suggest that instruction based on definitional associations is sufficient to affect word knowledge. (HOD)

The process of acquiring word meaning from context was investigated for high- and low-ability fifth-grade children. Findings demonstrated characteristics of processing that differentiate successful and less successful acquisition and underscore the complexity of the meaning-acquisition process. (HOD)

This study investigated whether or not Hong Kong Chinese adults would benefit from hearing, or phonologically processing, unfamiliar English words upon first encountering them. Participants, who represented different levels of English proficiency, included Chinese undergraduate students, postgraduate students, and adult native speakers of English.…

Reports results of the administration of a battery of tests of oral language skills to blind braille readers (N=15). Three skills were tested: phoneme deletion, sentence completion, and morphological analysis. Participants were congenitally blind high school students. Subjects differed from sighted readers only in the ability to perform…

A study investigated how second language learners responded when native speakers signaled difficulty in understanding them. Types and frequency of learner responses were examined in relation to communication tasks and to native speakers' different signal types. Results supported the construct of comprehensible output, the influence of linguistic…

Examination of the lexical compensatory strategies Dutch students of English used in a picture-naming task, a story retell task, and an oral interview showed that proficiency level was inversely related to the number of compensatory strategies the subjects used. The type of strategy was not related to proficiency level. (33 references) (Author/CB)

Research on the development of efficiency in spoken language understanding has focused largely on middle-class children learning English. Here we extend this research to Spanish-learning children (n=49; M=2;0; range=1;3-3;1) living in the USA in Latino families from primarily low socioeconomic backgrounds. Children looked at pictures of familiar…

The Wada test is at present the method of choice for preoperative assessment of patients who require surgery close to cortical language areas. It is, however, an invasive test with an attached morbidity risk. By now, an alternative to the Wada test is to combine a lexical word generation paradigm with non-invasive imaging techniques. However,…

The purpose of this study was to investigate viewers' knowledge of program content under various television translation modes and viewing experiences. Subjects were 176 students from the Center for Matriculation Program, Universiti Sains Malaysia in Penang, Malaysia. The Spanish version of an instructional television program was used; the program…