Purpose: Prior studies of discourse comprehension have concluded that the deficits of persons with aphasia (PWA) in syntactically based comprehension of sentences in isolation are not predictive of deficits in comprehension of sentences in discourse (Brookshire & Nicholas, 1984; Caplan & Evans, 1990). However, these studies used semantically…

Interpretation is the process whereby a hearer reasons to an interpretation of a speaker's discourse. The hearer normally adopts a credulous attitude to the discourse, at least for the purposes of interpreting it. That is to say the hearer tries to accommodate the truth of all the speaker's utterances in deriving an intended model. We present a…

Twenty-three subjects drew deductions from ten different pairs of conversationally conveyed requests, of which the first conveyed a positive request, the second, a negative. Some evidence shows the listener constructs the literal meaning before the conveyed meaning. (CK)

Children listened to stories which contained anomalies produced by violating semantic restrictions or based on conflicting propositions at two points in a story. The capacity to detect violations of sentences developed more rapidly than detection of violation of discourse. Children's developing capacity to integrate and store story structure is…

Investigates the language comprehension of elementary school children and the factors that affected acquisition of knowledge from connected discourse. Factors examined included oral and written language, message structure, characteristics of the learner, and conditions of the learning situation. (AA)

Explores whether children acquire semantic structures from early book reading experiences by examining similarities between discourse structures of stories read to and written by two small children. The generative relationship of prototypic and derived stories is demonstrated by the high correspondence between both constituent structure and…

Providing contextual cues leads to more effective learning than depth of semantic processing activity. However, the positive effects of contextual cues are reduced when the subject must search for the theme during the learning activity, as opposed to having it presented before the passage. (CP)

Discusses research in semantic processing and narrative discourse by psycholinguists, applied linguists, and speech pathologists. Focuses on children's comprehension of the language of instruction and contrasts normal and disordered comprehension and performance. Presents excerpts from two language evaluations that utilize some recent approaches…

A study investigated the extent to which native speakers (NSs) and non-native speakers (NNSs) of Portuguese understand implicatures in Brazilian television commercials in Portuguese. Subjects were nine Brazilian graduate students and 11 American students of Portuguese at the University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign. Correct inference of the…

Articles include: (1) "L'elaboration du materiel pedagogique pour des publics adultes" (The Elaboration of Teaching Materials for the Adult Public) by G. Painchaud-Leblanc, (2) "L'elaboration d'un programme d'etudes en francais langue seconde a partir des donnees recentes en didactique des langues" (The Elaboration of a Program…

Papers presented at the conference on applied linguistics include the following: "Speaking of Grammars: Is Big Beautiful?" (Jan Svartvik); "A Sociosemiotic View of the Grasp of Language at Reality: The Lexical Field 'Aesthetic Judgment'" (Wolfgang Kuhlwein); "Language as a Target and Instrument of the Educational Process…