A study of the cognitive processes involved in achieving coherence in discourse examined a major factor affecting the accessibility of referents: the length of absence of the referent from the distribution of different types of grammatical referential devices (definite nouns and anaphoric pronouns) in discourse. Six versions of a set of twenty…

Because teachers are asking for specific suggestions to help students apply comprehension skills and read content material, a mechanism that assists students in acquiring and applying specific comprehension skills as they read content texts is being investigated. The mechanism is called marginal gloss because learning activities are placed in the…

Since the concept of "communication competence" is a relatively recent development in the field of speech communication, there is as yet no universal agreement as to its definition and constitution. However, it seems that the purpose of the study of communication competence is to inform classroom instruction. The efforts to define and understand…

An investigation, analyzing the linking of skeleton and syntactical rules of Madurese, presents counterevidence to Marantz's claims about the nature of reduplication, and to Carrier-Duncan's claim that reduplication must precede all phonological rules. It is proposed that reduplication in Madurese is not affixation, as Marantz claims, and can be…

An examination of the word-finding problems and nonverbal communication in the conversations of three aphasic patients revealed three different patterns of communicative strategies and success in different kinds of activities, such as tests and conversation. One, with mainly a parietal lesion, hesitates often with turn-keeping gestures and stops…

Extending an earlier Donald Graves study by including students over seven years of age, this study identified relationships among the nature of writing tasks assigned by teachers and the written responses of elementary school students to those tasks. One class each at the third, fifth, and seventh grade levels provided eighteen sets of writing…

The concern of this book is to examine written language and its relation to what is ordinarily understood by the term oral language, the process of its acquisition, and the place of written language in the process of mental development. The eight chapters (1) examine the relation of written language to oral language and trace the phonocentric…

According to recent neurolinguistic theories and research, language and other analytic functions are located on the left side of the brain, while spatial and configurational abilities are located on the right side. However, there is some evidence that while learning a language requires the use of both hemispheres of the brain, the right hemisphere…

Theoretical issues related to the parallel role of internal revision in reading and writing are explored in this paper, which explains that meanings generated during reading or writing are always tentative and that readers and writers must build and maintain a continuous text world. The paper next examines criteria for evaluating the continuity of…

The relationship of readability, "readable writing" techniques, and comprehension was evaluated in a series of five experiments involving United States Navy recruits. Eight expository passages from a standardized reading test were revised by using word lists to simplify the vocabulary and a restriction in syntactic structure to simplify…

An error analysis of the oral production of Korean adults learning English was performed on informant speech samples, using Corder's Algorithm for providing data for description of idiosyncratic dialects as a guide for determing error. The procedures of error analysis and morpheme acquisition studies were combined to address the following…

Forced-choice items, investigating the performance of 80 undergraduates on verbal classification and verbal analogy, were sequentially presented, allowing independent estimates of the accuracy of four principle component processes: inference, application, recognition, and distraction. Within-task performance showed substantial individual variation…

Various communication studies have revealed the existence of a "preverbal" stage of communication consisting of centers within the brain that exists in an innate form or a form preprogrammed for future information acquired from the environment through experience (socialization). Such centers serve to prepare the individual for…

A study examined cognitive processing differences between metaphoric and literal sentences. Thirty-three undergraduate students listened to 96 test sentences (including 48 fillers) that expressed 1 meaning in either a novel or frozen metaphorical or literal form: "The old couch was in love with its new slipcover" (novel), "The old couch was at…

Behaviorism cannot adequately explain language processing. A synthesis of the psycholinguistic and information processing approaches of cognitive psychology, however, can provide the basis for a speculative analysis of reading, if this synthesis is tempered by a perceptual learning theory of uncertainty reduction. Theorists of information…