An attempt to answer questions surrounding the teaching of oral communication to children is presented. In each section, a pattern is followed. First comes the presentation of an example. Second, there is an explanation of the teaching efforts which led up to this oral product. Third, the author adds comments and raises questions to help the…

The idea of semantic features has taken some force within psychology and a number of research workers have suggested that semantic acquisition is, in some manner, determined by semantic components. This notion has come to be called the "semantic feature hypothesis". An examination of the semantic feature hypothesis was made by testing 80…

This newsletter reports on phenomena at the intersection of linguistics and psychoanalysis and psychiatry. This issue consists of the following articles: (1) an editorial entitled "Idioms, How We Love/Have You!", on the possible reasons behind the use of idioms; (2) "The Last Renaissance (Language in a Drug Rehabilitation Community)," by Harold…

One of the most important capacities which children employ when learning language is the capacity to generalize. A child who hears an utterance of a verbal expression while perceiving a particular object (or action, aspect, etc.) becomes normally able to apply the expression not only to this object but also to all those objects which, for him, are…

Seven sets of fifteen bi-polar adjectives corresponding to seven elements of organizational climate were compiled as a testing instrument which was administered to 124 working personnel at Platte Technical Community College in the fall of 1975. Respondents included faculty, students, support staff, and administrative personnel. Analysis of the…

Examines the interference of Cantonese on the levels of phonology, syntax and lexis in Mandarin Chinese. The article offers remedial suggestions, discusses the special needs of Cantonese students, and compares them to the needs of their English-speaking counterparts. (Author/KM)

This report discusses some of the factors that account for students' failure to understand everyday spoken language. Classroom language may be misleading when compared to everyday language. Pace of delivery is an obvious but ignored barrier to comprehension. Students should, therefore, be exposed to uncontrolled language data in the classroom.…

A discussion of a semantic approach to teaching these particles. The meaning of -zhe can be best characterized as "incompleteness.' Another characteristic of -zhe in a simple sentence is to change an action verb into a stative one. -Ne in conjunction with -zhe mitigates the incompleteness represented by -zhe. (Author/AMH)

Examines the expression of temporality in the basilang speech (the earliest stage of second language development) of five adult subjects. Temporality is studied from three perspectives: morphology, semantics, and pragmatics. The taxonomy provided by the pragmatic analysis best captures the expression of time at this level of interlanguage…

Describes the components and capabilities of expert systems, discusses the use of such systems in library information applications, and outlines research being done in this area. A project aimed at the development of an expert system for referral services is described in detail, and implications for future research are discussed. (CLB)

Determines some reasons that children may ignore detected inconsistencies in judging story adequacy. Results indicate that factors specific to a story and the construction of its internal representation, contribute to the judging and monitoring performance of children. (RJC)

Thirty-two hearing-impaired adolescents were assessed on comprehension of three anaphoric forms within conjoined sentences: repeated noun, personal pronouns, and null form. The null form anaphora in a semantically acceptable environment, in which some hearing-impaired students apply a deviant object-subject deletion rule, was significantly more…

Two experiments examine use of defining, characteristic, category, and identical semantic features of word concept information in cued recall. College adults and 7- to 11-year-old children were shown word triplets in which context words were related or unrelated to final target word. Results suggest meaning features differ in providing medium for…

Ten- to thirteen-year-old children selected either the objectively more effective keyword method or the naturalistic context method for learning vocabulary meanings. Concludes that, even in the absence of explicit performance feedback, children can be induced to reflect on their use of strategies and their outcomes on subsequent cognitive actions.…

Results of two experiments revealed a significant correlation between function-word predictability and reader enjoyment and a strong correlation between content-word unpredictability and reader enjoyment. (FL)