A study was carried out to assess the French language proficiency of kindergarten students enrolled in a French early immersion program and two "classes d'accueil," that is, a special program for non-French speaking immigrant children. The particular focus of the study was to investigate whether the level of proficiency in French is…

This report describes a new automated process that pioneers full-scale operational use of subject switching by the NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) Scientific and Technical Information (STI) Facility. The subject switching process routinely translates machine-readable subject terms from one controlled vocabulary into the…

E. Boder and S. Jarrico have developed a test designed to measure the cognitive deficits underlying reading disabilities, which they claim will identify two basic reader subtypes: those with deficits in auditory-linguistic processing skills (dysphonetic) and those with the inability to process visual-spatial information (dyseidetic). To examine…

The Shared Responsibility Model (SRM), a language process model that has been used effectively in classrooms that serve limited and proficient English speakers interacting within the same environment, can be utilized with Navajo children. SRM's philosophy recognizes that students learn and retain vocabulary most effectively when they: (1) learn…

"Writing to Read" is a computer based program designed to teach students with learning handicaps to "write to read." The philosophy of the program is that students will learn to read more effectively and efficiently if they are taught to write--to encode their normal language as the initial process in learning to read. Through…

The reading/writing project described in this document examined the basic cognitive activities children engage in when reading and writing, involved 67 children from grades 3, 6, and 9, and addressed these questions: Since reading and writing both involve the development of meaning, is there a common language core, or routines, that children…

This study examined the effects of children's cognitively based role expectations on their judgments of the grammatical acceptability of sentences. Sixty children, 12 each in grades 4 through 8, individually heard 10 sentences violating the Minimum Distance Principle (MDP). The sentences were grammatical, but linguistically complex, and violated…

The Language Arts Test of Cognitive Functioning (LATCF) was investigated to determine if the measure could give specific information about the thinking required for language arts tasks. The LATCF was developed by the author and consists of six anecdotes or tasks that the student must solve or complete. The anecdotes are built on six functions that…

The fact that some people learn a second language more easily than others has prompted numerous studies designed to link one factor or another with successful language learning. This work examines a large number of these studies to assess the importance of various factors involved in language learning. The influencing factors suggested are grouped…

Acknowledging the importance of sight to the writing process, the paper elucidates the processes of vision related to the composing process. In the opening section the physics of light and vision, optic neuroanatomy, and cortical responses to visual stimuli are explained. Next, theories of vision and data mapping are examined and their…

Preschool children's responses to "wh-questions" (those including the concepts who, what, where, when, how, and why) were studied in order to determine the influence of socioeconomic status (SES) on frequency of correct and incorrect answers. Investigation focused on three questions: (1) When a response to a wh-question is incorrect,…

A multiple choice Metaphor Preferences Test was administered to 138 preschool through college subjects to determine the role of a metaphor's ground in determining a metaphor's appeal, and to document the evolution of preferences for different types of grounds. Ground is the common property that links the two terms of a metaphor (topic and…

Research indicates that people have two distinct information processing modalities, one for verbal material and one for nonverbal material. The nonverbal mode is used for visual images and is characterized by creative and relatively undisciplined associations. The verbal mode deals with abstract stimuli and is restrained by logic and the need to…

Children aged 2;0 to 4;4, including native speakers of English, Italian, Serbo-Croatian, and Turkish, were asked to demonstrate causative statements by acting them out with toy animals and dolls. The major analysis focused on the total number of correct acting-out responses and the way this score related to several variables. Performance improved…

A study tested the hypothesis that educational differences experienced by children from minority and nonmainstream cultural backgrounds are caused by the discrepancy between the expectations, strategies, and schemata used at home and the cognitive and motivational demands of the classroom--a discrepancy not experienced by children from the…