Faculty Seminar in Reading Theory at Temple University of Education, Philadelphia May 8 and 9 1968

Noting that current theories of comprehension are based on the assumption that cognitive patterns (schemata) are structural constructs and that credit for the structural assumption is generally given to F. C. Bartlett, this paper suggests that problems concerning the phenomenal nature of the patterning aspect of cognition may be more readily…

Piaget's research on the processes and products of cognitive and representational development in early childhood is employed to outline the bases of early language development. The processes of assimilation and accommodation, leading to horizontal decalage; empirical and reflective abstraction, resulting in schemas and schemes; as well as…

Defining peak as the climax of discourse, this paper argues that it is important to identify peak in order to get at the overall grammar of a given discourse. The paper presents case studies in which four instances of peak in narrative discourses occur in languages from four different parts of the world. It also illustrates the occurrence of a…

KINDERGARTEN CHILDREN WERE USED AS SUBJECTS IN AN ATTEMPT TO DISCOVER WHETHER CHILDREN WITH SHORT AND LONG MEMORY SPANS USE DIFFERENT CUES TO RECOGNIZE WORDS AND WHETHER MEMORY SPAN TESTS ARE EFFECTIVE PREDICTORS OF DIFFICULTY IN LEARNING TO READ. IT WAS HOPED THAT CHILDREN WOULD EXHIBIT A CONSISTENT PATTERN OF CHOICES OVER TRIALS, WHICH MIGHT…

THE PHONETIC FEATURES NECESSARY FOR GOOD PRONUNCIATION AND EFFECTIVE USE OF LANGUAGES WERE STUDIED. A FOUR-WAY RESEARCH TECHNIQUE WAS DEVELOPED FOR COMPARISON AMONG LANGUAGES (1) INVOLVING SPECTROGRAPHIC ANALYSIS, (2) SPECTROGRAPHIC SYNTHESIS, (3) MOTION PICTURE ANALYSIS, AND (4) STATISTICAL ANALYSIS. THE ELECTRONIC INSTRUMENTATION CONSTRUCTED FOR…

A brief summary of research findings which support the hypothesis of scriptal knowledge structures in children and which indicates that children use such structures in ways very similar to those of adults is provided in this paper. Research reveals that when children as young as three are asked to tell what they know about events, they tend to…

Recently the relevance of dialectological study to reading instruction has become apparent. The teacher speaks one language while the child, often disadvantaged, speaks another. The ability to identify utterances is attributed to human tolerance called the phoneme concept, a generalization of a potentially infinite number of sounds into a small…

Experiments were carried out to determine (1) the degree of agreement with which subjects identify paragraph boundaries in unindented prose passages, (2) if a significant proportion of cues to paragraph structure are formal in nature, (3) if the identification of paragraphs in different kinds of prose differentially depends on semantic (as…

Presented and discussed are samples of controlled rhetoric frames, similar in appearance to composition frames but dissimilar in that they require very few arbitrary choices. A few of the required choices are strictly grammatical ones, but a great number of boxes contain grammatically, stylistically, and semantically disparate words and phrases…

Of the multitude of dialects which exemplify the Spanish language, Puerto Rican Spanish has suffered the most severe rejection by language purists and pseudolinguists. The need to take a clear and open look at Spanish spoken in Puerto Rico is preeminent. It is the purpose of this module to clarify some major points of controversy regarding Puerto…

The fourth volume in this series contains nine articles dealing with various aspects of Serbo-Croatian-English contrastive analysis. They are: "Adverbial Clauses of Cause, Place and Manner in English and Serbo-Croatian," by Gordana Gavrilovic; "Intransitive Verbs+Adverbials or Complements Containing Non-Finite Verb Forms," by…

Earlier sociolinguistic studies distinguish between Standard English and Black English with respect to indirect question formation. Standard English typically does not invert the tense-marker "do" in the imbedded question ("Ask John if he played basketball today") while Black English does ("Ask John did he play basketball today"). In fact, the…

This paper reports on a study designed to investigate the kinds of responses people produce during wrong-number telephone calls and to discover the rules that appear to govern the choices of the responses and their relationships. Fifty-seven calls were placed at different times during the day over a period of several weeks. The sentences used to…

The author of this paper argues that, in the study of current usage, we need to supplement data from corpus studies by using methods that elicit use, reports of use, and evaluations of use on items which interest them. Ten methods for experimental elicitation of such data are described, related to one another, and illustrated with examples of data…