Examines four different levels of development constituting writing as a technology for thinking. Discusses evolution (what speech affords thinkers), history (how text changed the collective construction of knowledge), ontogeny (how literacy affects the development of mind), and microgenesis (how writing facilitates thinking from moment to moment).…

Reviews four sets of computer-mediated materials for Chinese character learning. These include the following: Write Chinese, Chinese Characters Primer, Animated Chinese Characters, and USC Chinese Character Page. (Author/VWL)

Compared the skill in gender attribution of foreign learners and native speakers of French. Accuracy and fluency of gender attribution by the foreign learners were assessed in spontaneous written production. (Author/VWL)

Describes a course that used e-mail to improve the German and Spanish written language skills of Canadian Foreign Service Officers. To lower attrition rates, the course required completion of authentic professional tasks, exposing participants to formal, technical, and informal language. Though initial interest was high, attrition was also high,…

Offers a survey of recent codification efforts of the Romani language, a stateless, non-territorial language with no written tradition. In a pragmatic corpus analysis, three action-oriented functions of Romani codification are identified: a communicative function, on emblematic function, and a mobilizing-rallying function. (Author/VWL)

Investigated second- through sixth-grade children's word-reading skills by testing their processing of nonword primes. Determined that good readers showed more orthographic priming than poor readers at more times, and more pseudo-homophone priming at short durations. Determined that the quick, automatic and general activation of this priming…

A study investigated the use of verb and noun morphology in 60 children (ages 7-12) with and without language learning disabilities (LLD). Children with LLD showed high accuracy in spoken samples but substantial difficulty in written samples with the regular past tense and had difficulties with regular plurals. (Contains references.) (CR)

Arguments about how to teach initial reading are once more in the news. Proponents of "synthetic phonics" argue that there is only one effective way to teach a child to read. In this anniversary issue, it is worth taking a step back from the polarisation of the "synthetic" versus "analytic" phonics debate, to consider the evidence base for reading…

This paper utilizes Toulmin's original framework to analyse over 400 answers given by 11-year-olds to a question on a written mathematics test. The question required children to say whether a given statement is true and give a written explanation. Categorizations of answers are developed from the data and examined, suggesting that many children…

Over the last 30 years, much has been learned about how children develop as spellers. During that time, the literary confidence of many kindergarten, 1st-, and 2nd-grade children has been damaged by insisting they use conventional spelling when, in their thinking, it is impossible to understand how words can be spelled conventionally. This article…

This qualitative study investigated written discourse in the form of personal letters written by ten people with aphasia following stroke and ten people with cognitive-language disorder as a consequence of traumatic brain injury, and compared their performance with 15 non brain-damaged writers. Personal letters perform the dual function of…

Lexical retrieval is an essential subprocess of language production and crucial in fluent writing and speaking. In this study we discuss a new measure of the speed of written lexical retrieval in a second language, the Written Productive Translation Task (WPTT). In contrast to Picture Naming tasks, the WPTT is not restricted to concrete nouns and…

We obtained data on the writing of 110 deaf or hard-of-hearing students attending public schools who completed the spontaneous writing portion of the Test of Written Language. The average written quotient for the sample was in the below-average range but within 1 standard deviation of the test mean. Forty-nine percent of the sample received…

Cross-linguistic studies provide a unique tool for the identification of universal processes in oral and written language, both in development and in breakdown ("Annual Review of psychology," 52, 369?396). Examining the differential strengths and weaknesses of children with dyslexia in contrasting orthographies can help illumine both the more…

As was this author's usual habit at the university in Nebraska where she was teaching, she picked up a copy of the campus newspaper to read during her office hours. She was dismayed at a story entitled "Lakota May Appear on Sheridan County Polls." It read, in part: "Sheridan County's polls may have to add an unexpected language to…