A study compared 47 Spanish-speaking, predominantly English-speaking, and Spanish-English bilingual children's performance on a battery of semantic tasks. Children in all three groups achieved similar average levels of performance. The profiles of bilingual children in each language were somewhat different from those of the other children.…

Shows how language and subject teachers in London secondary schools are positioned differently through their discursive performance of pedagogues and knowledge and how members of classroom communities view language and subject teachers as unequal. Data analysis dew on ethnography of communication and semiotic functional approaches to explain the…

Discussion of problems that users have with Web searching focuses on a study of undergraduates that investigated three instructional methods (instruction by example, conceptual models without illustrations, and conceptual models with illustrations) to determine differences in knowledge acquisition related to three types of knowledge (declarative,…

Examines the means by which trade mark law establishes determinacy of form. The article probes how this points to assumptions about the nature of language that radically differ with those of orthodox 20th century linguistics, particularly in connection with the distinction between language and the use of language. (nine references) (CK)

Tests Pine & Lieven's (1993) suggestion that a lexically-based positional analysis can account for the structure of a considerable proportion of children's early multiword corpora. Results reveal that the positional analysis accounts for 60% of the children's multiword utterances and that most other utterances are defined as frozen. (33…

Reviews some history of how lexical representations have acquired an important role in sentence processing research. Discusses relevant issues, including the importance of timecourse information in theorizing; the importance of frequency information in theories of sentence processing; and the question of the grain of frequency information. (42…

Reports research in cross-cultural differences between Americans from the United States and Germans, regarding the connotations of vocabulary items, specifically two sample words: "Cliquen" and "Kneipen." Over a period of five years, more than 50 native speakers from both cultures, who had experience with the other culture, were interviewed on…

Explores developmental (age) differences in meaning that children at four grade levels assign to count and relational quantifiers. Results indicated 92 percent of the children demonstrated understanding of all count quantifiers. For relational quantifiers, mean numerical values assigned to four terms followed expected patterns; understanding of…

Translations of three Arabic texts into English illustrate the differences between the aural and visual modes of text development. An analysis of the function of these modes in their social contexts explains the problems of the negative transfer of habits from one language to another. (Author/CB)

Explores "political diglossia" in contemporary Poland, the unofficial, underground language of antipropaganda that arose in reaction to state propaganda. Colloquial and official designations for police and security forces are compared, and the semantics of relevant words and expressions are studied. Language is shown to reflect social…

Longitudinal observation of one- to three-year-olds' (N=2) acquisition of complement phrasal construction in Korean found that, in spite of typological differences between English and Korean, both syntactic and semantic characteristics were shared by children acquiring complement structure in the two languages. (Author/CB)

Describes aspects of lexico-semantic variation in Nigerian English. The causes and types of variation are discussed within the a sociolinguistic framework, and implications of such variations, with reference to international intelligibility and communication strategies, are examined. (20 references) (Author/OD)

A case study illustrates how the technique of semantic mapping can be used to help seriously emotionally handicapped adolescents organize and disclose their thoughts and feelings in stress-engendering situations, structure teacher-student interaction by providing a format, and enable the teacher to collect specific notes for later consultation…

Examines features of the negotiation of meaning between learners and teachers of English-as-a-Second-Language, and distinguishes between the declarative knowledge that words have particular meanings and the procedures typically employed for realizing this declarative knowledge. Negotiation exercises based on a checklist of the dimensions of…

Aims to heighten teacher awareness of the semantic, syntactic, and phoneme-grapheme transfer problems that Chinese students face. Provides teaching suggestions involving phonology, vocabulary, syntax, and morphology. Urges reading teachers to use the visual modality to help make the transfer to the English script system more successful. (RS)