A study examined the effect of five types of sentence faults on the method of information processing, recall ability, confidence rating, and comprehensibility rating of college freshman English students. The control text consisted of five passages and the accompanying comprehension questions exactly as they appear on the multiple choice Georgia…

A study was undertaken to learn whether involvement of the brain's right hemisphere in auditory language processing, a phenomenon found in a previous study of Crow-English bilinguals, was language-specific. Alpha blocking response as measured by electroencephalography (EEG) was used as an indicator of brain activity. It was predicted that (1)…

A study examined the phoneme-grapheme correspondence in native English-speaking kindergartners' spelling and compared it to the results of similar research with Spanish-speaking children. It tested the hypothesis that English-speaking children make their first grapheme-sound correspondences differently because of phonological differences in the…

This study investigated the relative ability of literate (n=24), semi-literate (n=45), and non-literate (n=21) adults to erase the initial consonant or vowel from non-words and pronounce the remaining phonemes. It was hypothesized that difficulty in removing the initial consonant from the vowel with which it coarticulates is due not only to…

Pragmatic epistemology of focal teacher thinking appears tightly shaped by modular connections between task domains and pragmatic organizers. Discussions with a group of language teachers identified four domains of tasks: (1) oral activities; (2) writing activities; (3) reading activities; and (4) language technique activities (grammar, spelling).…

Using a system based on standard augmented transition network (ATN) parsing approach, this report describes a technique for the rapid development of natural language parsing, called High-Level Grammar Specification Language (HGSL). The first part of the report describes the syntax and semantics of HGSL and the network implementation of each of its…

Edward Sapir's 1921 publication, "Language, An Introduction to the Study of Speech" is interpreted for beginning students of historical and descriptive linguistics. In his book, Sapir attempts to show (1) what he thinks language is, (2) what variables occur in language due to time and place, and (3) the relationship of language and…

Visual literacy--seeing with insight--enables child viewers of pictures to examine elements such as color, line, shape, form, depth, and detail to see what relations exist both among these components and between what is in the picture and their previous visual experience. The viewer can extract meaning and respond to it, either by talking or…

To study the emergence of literacy during the preschool years, a handwritten diary, maintained on a day to day basis, focused on one child, David, from ages two and a half to four and a half. One facet of the study concentrated on his literary language--his incorporation of written texts (children's literature) into his language and background of…

This study is concerned with linguistic obstacles in the production, transmission, and dissemination of scientific and technical information at the international level. Special reference is made to the problems of developing nations. Following brief discussions of the early use of language, the beginning of diversity of languages, diversity of…

An approach to reading instruction based on a socio-psycholinguistic theory of the language learning process is presented in this book. Chapter 1 provides an overview of oral and written language development; identifies language processes, language systems, and cultural setting; and describes a socio-psycholinguistic model of language learning and…

Recognizing the need for some form of evaluation of students' ability to understand the organization of ideas in different subject areas, a study was conducted to evaluate 450 paragraphs written by students aged 12 to 17. Students chose one of three groups of four words each to write on. Each group represented a category, the subjects being…

To explain some of the problems and questions concerning the study of communicative competence, this paper discusses observations that motivate activity in the area and several issues generated by the observations, and suggests implications of the issues raised. The observations discussed first are that humans manage to get things done…

A study explored how cognitive mapping assists college students in gathering information from long prose passages and organizing this information for subsequent writing. Mapping is a prewriting technique in which students develop a cognitive scheme or graphic representation of a text, which reduces memory load and facilitates integration and…

In recent characterizations of reading and writing, the distinctions melt into each other so that one definition serves for both: both are the creation of meaning. In the act of creating meaning, readers become writers and writers become readers. While reading is primarily receptive and writing is primarily productive, fluency in reading is very…