The comprehending score is a theoretically derived measure of language processing that identifies those miscues that indicate that the reader is making sense of the printed language he or she is attempting to read. A study was undertaken to explore the relationships between post oral reading cloze test scores and seven theoretically constructed…

The key ideas developed by the Writing across the Curriculum Project begun at the University of London in 1965 center on the ways in which discourse is acquired by children in a psycholinguistic sense. Among those ideas are (1) knowledge is socially determined through the interweaving of individual consciousnesses, each of which is busy construing…

Sound play is important to child language development in that it contributes to the phonetic substrate, it is a factor in phonological development, and it is something to be learned as part of the socially acceptable use of language. Sound play progresses in three stages: (1) babbling, in which a gradual acquisition of phonetic units is built up…

Four problems in children's paired-associate memory were addressed: (1) reappraisal of the presumed developmental trend in presentation mode effect during grade-school years, (2) identification of the locus of this developmental effect, (3) evaluation of the influence of combined presentation (verbal plus pictorial) relative to pictorial…

Sensitivity to story information that conflicted with expectations was examined in kindergarten, second, fourth, and sixth grade children. The children either read or listened to stories about familiar events. One story was consistent with children's "scripts" for these events, while the other story contained script-inconsistent information. All…

A schema developed for the teaching of reading involves five factors: learning, language, clues, mediums of communication, and adaptive processes. Learning involves four tasks, taught in the following sequence: comprehension, comparison of semantic shapes, composition of the whole into parts, and concentration. There are four general language…

A previous study by Gibson et al. (1972) that investigated the effect of orthographic structure on letter search was replicated and extended in order to identify factors that might explain the apparent discrepancy between their results and those of comparable studies. Experiment one tested whether the discrepancy might be explained by difference…

Reviews recent experimental and theoretical analyses of the relationship between level of processing and retention, and reports on two studies which tested predictions about the effects of orienting activities on retention. (AM)

Examines the Monitor Model of adult second language acquisition, and presents an alternate model that avoids difficulties inherent in the Monitor Model and that corresponds to contemporary language development theory. (Author/AM)

Motivational factors and unique characteristics of sign language systems are suggested as contributing to the ability of severely dysfunctional nonverbal children to make progress within a manual communication medium. (Author/EJS)

In experiments where hypnotized subjects learned one word list while happy or sad, retention proved to be surprisingly independent of the congruence of learning and testing moods. Learning mood provided a helpful retrieval cue and differentiating context only where subjects learned two word lists, one while happy, one while sad. (EJS)

In six experiments subjects saw and pronounced, either aloud or silently, seven-item lists made from vocabularies of phonologically identical items. These materials were used to test the predictions of a precategorical and a postcategorical hypotheses for the modality effect in immediate memory. (Author/SW)

Fifth-grade learning disabled and skilled readers (N=32) were compared on verbal dichotic listening tasks for free recall and cued recall of word lists organized by semantic, phonemic, and structural features. Results indicated that disabled readers were comparable on free recall but were inferior to skilled readers on cued recall. (Author/JW)

Describes a project that considers: how one's ability to produce non-native linguistic intuitions develops during adult second language acquisition; how non-native intuitions relate to the emerging of one's receptive and productive abilities in a second language; and what may be the appropriate empirical methodologies for collecting and analyzing…

The formation of relative clauses in the work of 48 Italian high school students of English as a foreign language who performed a variety of written and oral tasks is analyzed. Results indicate that markedness can be a valid predictor of interlanguage but that it can also constrain intertask variability. (CB)