Judgments of frequency for targets (old items) and foils (similar; dissimilar) steadily increase as the number of times a target is studied increases, but discrimination of targets from similar foils does not steadily improve, a phenomenon termed registration without learning (D. L. Hintzman & T. Curran, 1995; D. L. Hintzman, T. Curran, & B. Oppy,…

This study reports two experiments assessing the spelling performance of French first graders after 3 months and after 9 months of literacy instruction. The participants were asked to spell high and low frequency irregular words (Experiment 1) and pseudowords, some of which had lexical neighbours (Experiment 2). The lexical database which children…

Although recent trends have been towards large corpora, there is a valid place for the study of small corpora. This article is an example of one such study using a corpus of late 19th century texts, consisting of 1783 words in French by Perrin, and 2824 words in English by Thomson. Perrin uses more first person pronouns in a wider range of…

The article compares evidence from an electronic corpus of texts written for a child audience with specifications in the National Literacy Strategy. The concepts and terminology associated with corpus linguistics are introduced and explained, and the research study from which the findings derive is summarised. Results of the analysis are presented…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the issue of age-limited learning effects on visual lexical decision in normal and pathological aging, by using words with different frequency trajectories and cumulative frequencies. We selected words that objectively changed in frequency trajectory from an early word count (Thorndike, 1921, 1932;…

The present investigation is a study of the definitional style of nouns and verbs in typically developing school-age children. A total of 30 children in upper-elementary grades provided verbal definitions for 10 common high-frequency nouns (e.g., apple, boat, baby) and 10 common high- frequency verbs (e.g., climb, sing, throw). All definitions…

This study compared four different approaches to identifying technical words in an anatomy text. The first approach used a four step rating scale, and was used as the comparison for evaluating the other three approaches. It had a high degree of reliability. The least successful approach was that using clues provided by the writer such as labels in…

The purpose of this study was to analyze the speech of mothers and fathers as they interacted with their children in a similar setting. Specifically, the study compared mothers' and fathers' speech patterns in interactions with their preschool children, focusing on utterance length, sentence types, and word frequencies. Speech samples were…

The object of this investigation was to demonstrate whether or not the predictabilities of the individual letters of words influence recognition of a word. The results indicate that letter predictability influences both accurate word recognition and letter recognition. (DE)

Some of the new statistical research of Wladimir D. Admoni and the language typology work of Winfred P. Lehmann is presented. It is then shown that the results of the two methods can be put together to bring forth new knowledge about the present-day tendencies of German syntax. (Text is in German.) (TL)

A corpus of 400,000 words from Brazilian Portuguese conversation yielded 89,200 verb forms. The verbs are analyzed as to occurrence and function and many are listed in order of frequency. (CK)

Recent work on the development of Synthesized User Based Terminology Index Languages (SUBTIL), i.e., index and query languages for information systems which employ vocabulary elicited from potential users of the system, is described in this paper. Following a brief review of the literature on thesaurus construction and index languages is a…