Extensive longitudinal data were gathered on a child's entry into the symbolically mediated modal world by examining changes in the semantics and pragmatics of her uses of modal auxiliary verbs. The data are 53 transcripts of natural conversations between a girl, Nina, and her mother recorded periodically from her 23rd month to her 39th month. The…

The semantic differential scale developed by Charles Osgood, George Suci, and Percy Tannenbaum can be modified to create a method of evaluating student writing that is clear, efficient, flexible, and specific. Based upon the premise that most terms have several dimensions of meaning, the theory creates scales by drawing "lines" through the…

A study compared the instructional strategies of semantic mapping and semantic feature analysis with a traditional contextual approach for vocabulary acquisition. Subjects, 36 fourth, fifth, and six grade classes, were taught a set of 15 target words in each of the three instructional conditions for each of 3 weeks. Classes were assessed at the…

A study to develop a methodology for discovering how one important notion or semantic category, "frequency of occurrence," is expressed in words, phrases, or other linguistic devices in academic English began with a search for devices expressing that notion, by analyzing text from a news magazine, a New Zealand geography textbook, and a…

It is argued that the general consensus of researchers of child language that the grammatical system underlying the child's earliest multiword utterances is semantically-based, fails to provide an adequate description of even the earliest multiword utterances, and that the most sparing account of the acquisition data must include reference to…

A study of the development of abstract noun definitions in children and adolescents had as its subjects 120 students evenly divided into age groups of 10-, 14-, and 18-year-olds, randomly selected from students scoring in the 40th to 88th percentiles on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills (for 10-year-olds) and the Tests of Achievement and Proficiency…

Revised Version of a paper presented at the 1973 TESOL Convention in San Juan, Puerto Rico. (HW)

This study investigated kindergarten, first, and second grade children's ability to make linguistic judgments about sentneces that were either correct or disrupted along semantic or grammatical lines. Sentences on the judgment task were created according to clearly specified rules utilizing grammatical features that could be transformed into…

Questionnaires were completed by 131 married couples to determine the role of dispositional jealousy on marital success. The total jealousy in the marriage was found to be negatively related to several indices of marital success. Further analyses indicated that marital outcomes were negatively associated with the husband's perception of the wife's…

Two experiments are presented to clarify the relationships among different information codes available to a fluent reader and the utilization of syntactic and semantic knowledge to facilitate word identification. Use of context is measured with a word boundary task on passages with either coherent or random organization. Orthographic pattern and…

The hypothesis that the VPI and WVI are measuring the same domain based on theoretical similarities was tested using 195 male freshperson students. The data were analyzed by correlational technique including discriminant analysis. The results allow for the interpretation that the VPI and WVI are in fact measuring two distinctive domains. (Author)

Two groups of older (60+) respondents, matched on age but differing in educational level, and a group of young university undergraduates were compared for scale-checking styles on the Semantic Differential. Subjects rated six concepts pertaining to stages of life on 27 pairs of bipolar adjectives. (Author)