This study a) compared the anxiety levels of three groups of student teachers just prior to and immediately following the student teacher experience and b) ascertained whether or not the concept of student teaching changed in pleasantness during the teaching experience. Two groups of students (N=36, N=15) were instructed through traditional…

Abstracts of 23 addresses given at the Sixteenth Annual Conference on Linguistics are presented in this report. The papers given at the conference deal with French, American English, English, Japanese, Cantonese, Latin, and Proto-Indo-European and cover a wide variety of topics, including dialectology, form classes, grammar, and semantics. The…

This book is an introduction to linguistics, written for the beginning student. Among the topics explored are speculations about the origins of language, its nature, how it grows, and how it changes. Other topics include what is essential in the structure of language, the similarities and differences among languages, how the varying patterns of…

A technique of measuring meaning was developed to allow the quantification of the meaning of a concept to a respondent. For purposes of this research, a set of scales based upon the language patterns of a large city public school children was developed. A brief review of Di Vesta's work in the development of semantic differential scales is…

Research conducted to determine the effect of certain measurable characteristics of written material upon speed of memorization is presented. The characteristics studied fall into four classes: (1) Load measures reflecting informational density, (2) Length measures based upon number of syllables, words, kernel sentences, clauses, or sentences in a…

This study investigated semantic aspects of children's language as it is related to emotional expression. Children's ratings of vocabulary items categorized as expressing happy, sad, loving, angry, confident, and scared feelings were examined in three different ways: in isolation, in verbal contexts, and accompanying pictures of emotional…

In order to establish whether voice pitch and evaluative meaning play any significant role in affecting message learning (as demonstrated by listeners' recall) at the morphemic level of communication, 48 freshman students in a basic speech program participated in this study. Through individual headsets, students listened to tapes containing an…

Research in bilingualism has shown that the balance between a bilingual's two languages is rarely even and that there is something special about the mother tongue. Theories concerning separate storage of the two languages and first language primacy predict that: (1) the meanings of translation-equivalent words are not identical, and (2) the…

The relationships between a child's perceptual space and the acquisition of language are discussed in light of the work of Clark, Fillmore, and Chafe. Early language is analyzed as a semantic structure where linguistic ties are established between semantic features and inherent and relational perceptual features. Of these, it is the relational…

Fifty-eight undergraduates took part in an experiment evaluating a full-spectrum light closely approximating natural sunlight and a cool-white fluorescent light commonly used in institutional settings. Four classes of a single teaching assistant were used and each class was compared against itself under different lighting conditions. Data were…

The semantic differential was used to assess the properties of affect elicited by occupational stimuli. Vocationally committed men studying medicine, business, and engineering responded to a semantic differential containing occupational concepts. Results show a semantic space for all three groups composed of three orthogonal dimensions of affect…

An approach to teaching grammar to university students in a reading comprehension course in English as a foreign language is presented. It is argued that the material and the method of teaching should be determined by the special aim of the course. (Author/RM)

This article discusses the ordering of semantic units such as nouns and verbs in Chinese sentences, with references to problems encountered by students of Chinese. (CLK)

Discusses the many uses of the honorific title of "Don" in Spanish literature and Spanish colloquial speech. It may be used to joke and express irony, as in the expression "don ladron" (sir thief), and forms part of many idiomatic expressions. (Text is in Spanish.) (TL)

Two experiments examined the comprehension of singly and multiply negated sentences. Difficulty of comprehension was measured by the speed and accuracy with which subjects judged the semantic reasonableness of sentences. Marked and negatively prefixed adjectives were a particular focus of the study. (Author/RM)