A discourse analysis of sixty French children aged ten to twelve from two socioeconomic groups. The object of the study was to describe the syntactic-semantic functioning of their language in an "abstract" situation and to determine the degree of influence of socio-cultural factors. (Text is in French.) (AMH)

This study demonstrates that a property of verbs, implicit causality, is important in determining coreference of potentially ambiguous anaphoric pronouns in a timed comprehension task. Verbs were classified according to bias toward a noun phrase; pairs of sentences were constructed for each. Response time was faster for congruent sentences. (CHK)

Levels of processing were manipulated as a function of acquisition task and type of recognition test in three experiments. Experiment I showed semantic acquisition to be superior to rhyme acquisition given a standard recognition test, whereas rhyme acquisition was superior given a rhyming recognition test. Results are interpreted and discussed.…

A summary of the study of false cognates by Koessler and Derocquigny. The following topics are studied: The origin and meaning of the term; a classification according to monosemy or polysemy; false cognates on the multilingual level and in language families; and extensions of meaning. (Text is in French.) (AMH)

Several studies on vocabulary building in a language course are cited. Questions based on the author's experience as teacher, lexicographer and professor of lexicology are raised regarding exercises based on morphology, semantics, word derivation, and other lexical facts. (Text is in French.) (AMH)

Following a summary of various theories of language levels, a limited number of textbooks are examined according to their orientation toward either a descriptive analysis of the language or encouragement of expression and creativity among students. A bibliography of textbooks, books and articles is included. (Text is in French.) (AMH)

With reference to Chinese language and its unique orthography, evidence for language-related differences in manners of information processing is reviewed. These differences include visual form perception, manipulation of numbers, and memory versus manipulation and elaboration of verbal information. (Author/RH)

Deals with knowledge of scalar transformations among Brazilian students and construction foremen. Compares students' mathematical experience to foremen's. Reports study on students' and foremen's performance in solving scale drawing problems. Discusses aspects of relationship between learning mathematical procedures in school and daily life and…

Developmental differences in the relative salience of features in concept representations in semantic memory and their contributions to differences in cued recall were examined in two experiments. Subjects were second graders, fifth graders, and college students. Results showed that recall varied with feature salience, with salience greatest for…

Adults' perceptions of infants' cries were evaluated by means of multidimensional scaling. Twenty-four nonparents and 20 parents judged the similarity of all possible pairs of 12 recorded cries. Subjects also rated the cries on 29 attributes, including perceived aversiveness, possible caretaking responses, affective responses, and semantic…

Describes a prototype natural language text knowledge system (TKS) that was used to organize 50 pages of a handbook on artificial intelligence as an inferential knowledge base with natural language query and command capabilities. Representation of text, database navigation, query systems, discourse structuring, and future research needs are…

Reviews notions of visual simplicity found within the literature of the analytical framework provided by Charles Morris' communication model. Examines Morris' syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic communication levels. (AEW)

The study evaluated characteristics of instructional bimodal communication in classrooms for the hearing impaired using Signing Exact English or Signed English. Findings indicated some teachers accurately and proficiently encoded semantic information in their instruction. A requirement of 80% or better voice-to-sign ratio ability is suggested for…

Describes the "Small Valence Lexicon," a dictionary of 461 of the most commonly used German verbs, with information about their morphosyntactic characteristics and the sentence structures in which they occur. Some of the problems faced by the authors of the dictionary in applying the valence theory to their description of verbs is discussed. (MS)