A study investigated the role of video and/or sound in the processing of aural French as a second language in grade-eight core French. Results indicate visual cues were informative and enhanced general comprehension but did not necessarily stimulate understanding of the specific text. Affective and attentional advantages were noted. (Contains 28…

Investigates the role of morphological structure in the representation and processing of Mandarin Chinese compounds. Results provide evidence against single-layer, morpheme-based models of the Chinese mental lexicon, pointing instead to a two-layer, whole-word and morphemic model (the Multi-Level Cluster Representation Model). (67 references)…

Describes the specific aspects of a collaborative project designed to encourage teen parents to read to their children and discusses how various organizations were involved. Includes a bibliography of children's books and support materials purchased for the program. (NH)

This study set out to investigate the self-teaching of good and poor readers in pointed Hebrew--a highly regular orthography. Four groups of children (three groups in Grades 4 to 6, and one group in Grade 2) were included in this study; poor readers with large discrepancies between IQ and reading ("dyslexics"), IQ-nondiscrepant poor…

This study investigated whether second language (L2) proficiency affects pragmatic comprehension, namely the ability to comprehend implied meaning in spoken dialogues, in terms of accuracy and speed of comprehension. Participants included 46 native English speakers at a U.S. university and 160 Japanese students of English in a college in Japan who…

This study investigates whether proficient second language (L2) speakers of Spanish and English use the same parsing strategies as monolinguals when reading temporarily ambiguous sentences containing a complex noun phrase followed by a relative clause, such as "Peter fell in love with the daughter of the psychologist who studied in California."…

Understanding a text requires more than the ability to read individual words: it depends greatly on vocabulary knowledge. This important book brings together leading literacy scholars to synthesize cutting-edge research on vocabulary development and its connections to reading comprehension. The volume also reviews an array of approaches to…

Variations in the amount and nature of early language to which children are exposed have been linked to their subsequent ability (e.g. Huttenlocher, Haight, Bryk, Seltzer & Lyons, 1991; Hart & Risley, 1995). In three computational simulations, we explore how differences in linguistic experience can explain differences in word learning ability due…

How can one better use modern CALL resources to help language learners to build up a larger target language (TL) vocabulary quickly? A major need that quickly becomes apparent at the intersection of the fields of second language vocabulary acquisition (SLVA) and computer-assisted language learning (CALL) is the lack of sufficient research with…

This study examined the development of reading and reading-related skills for native and nonnative speakers of English through the first and second grades. Tasks assessing reading, phonological, and language processing were administered to 36 native English speakers (NS) and 38 children who spoke English as a second language (ELL). Both ELL and NS…

Background: English-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI) perform more poorly than their typically developing peers in verbal working memory tasks where processing and storage are simultaneously required. Hungarian is a language with a relatively free word order and a rich agglutinative morphology. Aims: To examine the effect…

A study examined the differences between 17 children with language disorders and 20 children with normal language development (ages 8-13) in the way they developed shared knowledge with an adult using an interactive communication task. The structure interaction map task involved the child describing a route through a simple schematic map to an…

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…