The purpose of this study was to investigate viewers' knowledge of program content under various television translation modes and viewing experiences. Subjects were 176 students from the Center for Matriculation Program, Universiti Sains Malaysia in Penang, Malaysia. The Spanish version of an instructional television program was used; the program…

Three experiments investigated whether word order and case markers play a role in the native speaker's comprehension of Japanese. In Japanese, verbs are at the clause-final position and the order of words other than the verb appear to be flexible. The fact that verb information does not become available until the end of a clause suggests that…

This paper focuses on techniques for retrieval used in information sciences and in World Wide Web search engines. The purpose of reference service and information science is to provide useful information in response to a query. The two metrics of recall and precision serve to express information retrieval performance. There are two major…

A major synthesis of the latest research on early language acquisition, this book explores what gives infants the remarkable capacity to progress from babbling to meaningful sentences, and what inclines a child to speak. The book examines the neurological, perceptual, social, and linguistic aspects of language acquisition in young children, from…

This study investigated the development of oral metalinguistic abilities in 140 children (ages 5-12) with oral language or reading impairments. The study focused on determining the difficulties that children with these different types of problems have at different ages in the elementary school years and determining how metalinguistic abilities…

A collection of essays on the comprehension of text brings together perspectives of different disciplines on discourse. Articles include: "Naturalistic Texts and Naturalistic Tasks" (Herre van Oostendorp, Rolf A. Zwaan); "Psychological Studies of Naturalistic Text" (Arthur C. Graesser, Joseph P. Magliano, Karl Haberlandt);…

An autosegmental account of the child's acquisition of grammatical tone in Sesotho, a southern Bantu language, is presented. The following theoretical questions are addressed: (1) When and how does the child figure out that Sesotho is a tonal rather than intonational, stress, or accentual language?; (2) How does the child acquire tonal rules?; and…

A study examined emergent readers' reconstructions of familiar storybook texts for evidence of cohesive harmony. The study focused on: the range of cohesive harmony; whether the level of cohesive harmony would reach linguistic significance; and whether patterns within the original text would emerge. Fourteen inner-city kindergartners were…

In order to teach anything, two fundamental questions must be asked and answered continually: What should be taught, and how should it be taught? The answer to the second question is highly dependent on the answer to the first, but the present answer to the first question is inadequate and inappropriate to today's communication tools. Language…

In linguistic analysis of the speech act, the data used to support theoretical conclusions are too often comprised of semantically isolated utterances of the ideal speaker-hearer. In reality, one of the most revealing kinds of data is imperfect data, where the functioning language processes are often unmasked. The study of first language…

Defining readability in both the narrow sense of formula use and refinement and the broader sense of the processing and comprehension of language, this paper argues for the need for more research focusing on readability as a way of improving the match between reader and text. Following a brief introduction, the paper reviews current readability…

Impromptu speech is heard only once, at a rate of perception that depends on the speaker's delivery, and is specifically adapted to the listeners. These features trigger cognitive activities that facilitate translation. Impromptu speech is characterized by a constant interconnection between cognitive competence and language competence and between…

Children and adults participated in a series of experiments to examine certain cues to surface constituency that are salient to children in the recognition of syntactic structure. Cue recognition was studied through a set of experiments requiring seven-year-old children to repeat certain syntactic constituents. It was found that the children could…

Using ethnographic methodology, a study investigated the writing processes, in English, of 10 Spanish-speaking bilingual/bicultural graduate students and the possible influence of their linguistic and cultural backgrounds upon these processes. All subjects had been born and initially schooled through the twelfth grade in Latin America, and had…

This study investigated the diagnostic effectiveness of the Language Assessment Tasks (LAT) in differentiating language disordered students from nonhandicapped students. LAT was administered individually to two groups of subjects (experimental and control) matched for sex, race, and birthdate (ages 9-14 years). The performances of each group of…