This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 30 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) conditional constructions in modern English; (2) phonological and phonetic effects of nasalization on vowel height; (3) neural coding of pitch; (4) the…

The purpose of this experimental study was to determine the effects of interactive video versus traditional lecture on cognitive learning and affective behaviors of undergraduate nursing students. It was hypothesized that there would be no significant differences in the cognitive achievement scores of students taught by an interactive videodisk…

The proceedings include the following papers: "Why We Study Child Language"; "Children's Use of Information in Word Learning"; "An Examination of the Initial Mapping of Verb Meanings"; "Evidence for the VP Constituent from Child Korean"; "The Role of Stress, Position, and Intonation in the…

A study explored the use of a text-copying task for the determination of syntactic constituent structure. It was predicted that the task would be a naturalistic, reasonably direct, and sensitive psycholinguistic research method. In two experiments, 70 subjects wrote out copies of typed passages. The points where they paused and looked back to the…

A discussion of semantic interpretation argues that contradictions such as "Sue's both right and wrong" are assigned consistent propositional interpretations such as "Sue's partly right and partly wrong" by universal semantic principles, which obviates analysis via conversational maxims and implicatures. First, it is shown from investigation of…

These proceedings of the 1976 Georgetown Round Table are divided into four sections that deal with: (1) synchronic and diachronic aspects of semantics; (2) semantics and linguistics; (3) semantics and other disciplines; and (4) semantics and teaching methods. More specifically the papers treat: the semantic interpretation of anaphoric expressions;…

In a German study, students' descriptions of the processes in an electric circuit were related to the energy view as it is used in physics. (The representation of students' concepts describing the electric circuit is of importance because structured concepts may influence the perception and description of processes, the handling of electrical…

Investigations using English have shown that a number of linguistic constructions associated with reporting verbs, and verbs concerning plans, present comprehension difficulties to children over the age of five. The corresponding constructions in Greek involved ambiguity appreciation, and tests of monoglots and bilinguals indicated that a…

This book is intended to serve as a broad orientation to the discipline of language study rather than as an introduction to be employed in technical linguistics classes. The 13 chapters touch upon aspects of theoretical as well as applied linguistics, including psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, and language instruction. Each chapter is followed…

This paper discusses the English verbal inflectional system within the lexicalist framework. A lexicalist approach to syntax is one in which all syntactic grammatical relations, lexical items, and the result of transformations are subject to semantic interpretation. That is, semantic information cannot be generated by syntactic rules. A filtering…

This paper discusses the factors that either facilitate or inhibit vocabulary learning and suggests practical classroom techniques for beginning and more advanced students. Vocabulary acquisition is related to the learning situation and to the form, meaning, and grammatical role of the new item in the target language. The focus of the teaching…

The development of two instruments useful in evaluating supervisory behavior is described in this paper. Form 1 of the Supervisory Behavior Description Questionnaire (SBDQ) is an ordinal-type scale originally composed of eight sub-scales and 132 triads of items. Each item is composed of a very directive statement, a collaborative statement, and a…

Four conference papers on discourse are included. In "How Context Contributes to the Interpretation of Temporal Expressions," Carlota S. Smith provides a summary analysis of the temporal interpretation of English sentences. Many sentences are shown to be semantically incomplete; it is argued that information from neighboring sentences is…

Focusing on the acquisition of semantic features and the relation between semantic and perceptual features, this study further tests the "semantic feature hypothesis," where a child acquires full adult word meaning component by component, and its complementary "correlation hypothesis," which claims that the source of these semantic features lies…

Conceptual and syntactic strategies in reading a foreign language are considered with attention to the functioning of the sentence parser. Topics of analysis include: the theoretical background and the educational relevance of the question of strategies; a study of the relative importance of the two parsing principles (syntactically guided…