In order to establish whether voice pitch and evaluative meaning play any significant role in affecting message learning (as demonstrated by listeners' recall) at the morphemic level of communication, 48 freshman students in a basic speech program participated in this study. Through individual headsets, students listened to tapes containing an…

This paper, presented in English and in Spanish, isolates one area of English for Academic Purposes, listening comprehension, and makes some preliminary suggestions as to factors that might be relevant in course planning and, particularly, in the design of materials. In preparing a language program, a highly instrumental approach should be…

An experimental context designed to directly affect discourse processing by inducing subjects to generate inferences involving text content was compared to a context in which subjects simply listened to and recalled the content of a text. Context did effect the amount of inferred and overgeneralized semantic information in subjects' text recalls.…

A study examined cognitive processing differences between metaphoric and literal sentences. Thirty-three undergraduate students listened to 96 test sentences (including 48 fillers) that expressed 1 meaning in either a novel or frozen metaphorical or literal form: "The old couch was in love with its new slipcover" (novel), "The old couch was at…

Memory for sex of the speaker and language of presentation of a spoken message was high and reliably better when the features were instrumental for comprehending the message than when they were not. This suggests that the physical characteristics of an event may be deeply or elaborately encoded when they are meaningful in light of the task…

Reaction time to detect a phoneme target in a sentence was faster when the target-containing word formed part of the semantic focus of the sentence. Sentence understanding was facilitated by rapid identification of focused information. Active search for accented words can be interpreted as a search for semantic focus. (Author/RD)

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…

A survey of 25 international students studying in Massachusetts colleges gathered information on 4 specific aspects of their American college experience (recruitment, orientation, adaptation, and acculturation) as well as about their experiences with English. In interviews, nine students said they had had no problems with the English language;…

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…