A study investigated the hypothesis that children are sensitive to functors in language and only omit them due to factors specific to speech production and after having analyzed them as separate morphemes. This hypothesis was tested as an alternative to two existing hypotheses concerning children's selective listening for content words and for…

A study investigated whether very young children use the concept of mutual exclusivity to make an initial link between a word and an object, and whether its use is linked to age or intelligence differences. Three groups of normally-developing children, aged 1 to 3 years, and three groups of older, mildly retarded children with similar levels of…

Since past studies have shown that females as well as left-handers do not demonstrate a right-ear advantage for verbal materials, suggesting that linguistic functions may not be handled in the left hemisphere exclusively, a study was conducted to examine these laterality effects more closely. Subjects, 24 undergraduate students at a small college…

A model for adult language learning is developed based on the postulates that language is semiotic, contextual, communicative, and cultural. Research in psycholinguistics has discovered that a cognitive and recognitional knowledge of language underlies and is greater than performative language. The move from the first level, the semantic base, to…

A study is presented which attempts to clarify the notion of communicative proficiency in a foreign language and which outlines an instructional model that incorporates the insights of the study. Communicative proficiency is defined as fluent mastery of the foreign language in different contexts. The definition was operationalized into discourse…

Education has often created and widened the distinctions between reading and writing rather than focusing on their relationship. More recently, however, research has advanced a view that recognizes reading and writing to be instances of communication between people. Research also suggests that five kinds of knowledge (informational, structural,…

Language research over the past two decades has revealed that language is not something children "acquire," but rather a system they build. A key factor in this linguistic construction is children's interaction with parents or other caregivers. The studies reveal further that children's repeated interactions with books and stories and…

Procedures are described for use in foreign language classes that tap the characteristics of gifted students. Each activity is directly associated with at least one of the cognitive characteristics attributed to the gifted, which are listed in the introductory section of the paper. The procedures include the following activities: conducting a…

This paper outlines current cognitive perspectives on second language acquisition (SLA). The Associative-Cognitive CREED holds that SLA is governed by the same principles of associative and cognitive learning that underpin the rest of human knowledge. The major principles of the framework are that SLA is Construction-based, Rational,…

Listening is a crucial element in the communication process. To date, however, research efforts have been unsuccessful in identifying the proper role that listening should play in the building of communication theory. To be a legitimate part of the communication process, listening must be placed in a conceptual framework similar to those found in…

There are many children, termed "perseverative," whose reading comprehension problems stem from the fact that they form hypotheses about the meaning of a text at the onset of reading, then fail to evaluate or modify those hypotheses on the basis of subsequent text findings. A study was undertaken to identify such readers and to explore…

Explanations for differences in reading proficiency should be constructed around an atlas of reading-related individual differences in cognition. Such an atlas should include well-documented "bottom-up", text-driven reading strategies and less thoroughly investigated "top-down", schema-driven reading strategies. Research…

A review of the literature reveals that three writing skills have been of particular interest to writing researchers recently. First, work on planning the rhetorical strategy recognizes three components of the planning process: prewriting, pausing, and reviewing what has been written. Second, research on audience analysis indicates that maturity…

There appear to be two basic theories about the relationship of written language to oral language and the relationship of writing to reading. The first theory views written language as a derivative of oral language and as an alternate but parallel form of oral language. The pedagogical implications of this model suggest that the problems of…

Controlling the rate of oral delivery in the second language classroom has been demonstrated as beneficial to the learner, whose information-processing capacity is an important factor in listening comprehension. Rate of information delivery can be controlled by limiting the actual rate of words per unit of time, or by maintaining content…