Discusses factors that will aid teachers in their efforts to spark inner-city students to understand modes of discourse and therefore write interesting themes. (Author/RL)

Reports on two experiments, one performed on infants, the other on adults, designed to examine the issue of categorical perception of speech contrasts in infants in relation to linguistic processing and the innateness theory of speech perception. (AM)

Tested the hypotheses that errors of ommission would occur more frequently than errors of commission and errors would be related to stimulus complexity. A total of 48 children from grades 1 and 3 were given a memory task (involving visual and haptic memory) for recognition of random polygons. (MS)

A total of 84 Israeli middle- and upper-middle-class nursery school, second and fifth grade children were subjects for a study investigating parallel shifts in dimensional salience and the dominance of these dimensions as organizing principles in memory. (MS)

Pigeons learned discrimination rapidly and responded differentially to pictures seen for the first time. The essential feature of a natural discrimination--which is the ability to cope with natural ranges of variation--was approached and earlier experimental results were extended using other classes of stimuli. (Author/RK)

Two experiments are presented in which lateralization of monaural, auditory input affected the evaluation of verbal passages. Discusses lateral differences in evaluating auditory stimuli in the framework of the left hemisphere's specialization for the holistic processing of objective information and the right hemisphere's specialization for the…

Several experiments investigated the effect of word length on recognition thresholds for both familiar English words and unfamiliar pseudowords, the thresholds measured both with and without a stimulus mask. (Editor)

Notes that, in Spanish, there is empirical support for the notion that, in visual word recognition, the syllables initially activate competing lexical candidates. Presents experiments intended to explore these inhibitory processes and discusses the applicability of the data to a dual-route model and the time course of syllabic processing. (55…

Discusses some of the theory underlying visual access tools for special collections, introduces a specific World Wide Web application using the technology, and indicates some of the potential of the tool for visual access to images as well as text documents. Appendices include texts of courses used for proximity calculations as well as NASA…

A French-language version of stock footage videotapes from previous research (using English-language data) was prepared, using the same images. The most popular terms identified in each of the two studies for each of the shots are compared, to determine the rate of correspondence between potential indexing terms in each language. (Author/AEF)

This investigation with 122 college students, including 45 deaf students, found that neither deaf nor hearing students demonstrated a statistically significant advantage in accuracy or recall of nonverbal information about people in photographs. Deaf subjects, however, were more than twice as likely as hearing subjects to base their judgments upon…

This study investigates the phenomenon that listeners of English were surprisingly accurate at predicting the temporal end of a sentence when only given the part up to the "potentially last word," that is a noun before an optional prepositional phrase of varying lengths. Results of four experiments using either French or English are given. (35…

Examined the associations among speech perception, phonological awareness, naming speed, verbal memory, and word reading. Multiple measures were administered to 136 3rd- and 4th-grade children. Results indicated that naming speed was particularly highly associated with speech perception, whereas phonological awareness was substantially correlated…

Focuses on how reading comprehension can be facilitated with a multimedia application for second language learning. Results indicate that a dynamic visual advance organizer does aid in overall comprehension and that annotations of individual vocabulary items consisting of both visual and verbal information help more than verbal information only.…

Discusses "cued shadowing," during which subjects listen to pairs of words or sentences and repeat a target word signalled by a cue. Rapid semantic and grammatical priming effects have been observed with this technique, both with word and sentence contexts and at different positions within sentence contexts, in normal children and adults, and in…