Some 2700 Belgian students (grades five through twelve) participated in this study of the relationships between linguistic features of passages and passage readability estimated from cloze procedures. Clozed versions of each of 60 test passages were prepared and administered to students at various grade levels. Twenty-five linguistic features of…

Content areas teachers must assume responsibility for teaching students the basic reading skills that are necessary for achieving success in their field. Content teachers frequently must be convinced that reading skills are a valid part of their curriculum and must be given help in teaching these skills. They should be shown that the teaching of…

The study examined whether an awareness that semantic organization is beneficial to picture recall ("semantic enhancement") precedes an awareness that certain types of organization are more beneficial than others ("levels of processing"). A series of pilot studies was conducted with kindergarten and adult subjects and a formal…

Two major hypotheses are currently at issue concerning the effects of semantic context on ambiguous word recognition: (1) the selective-retrieval hypothesis (SRH) maintains that a single meaning is retrieved from memory, and (2) the nonselective-retrieval hypothesis maintains that all meanings are retrieved from memory. To help clear up this…

This paper deals with the relation between etymologically related words in different languages. A survey is made of seven stages in the development of contrastive lexicology. These are: prelinguistic word studies, semantics, lexicography, translation, foreign language learning, bilingualism, and finally contrastive analysis. Concerning contrastive…

The purpose of this paper is to examine the status of deictic reference in the speech of 19 three-year-old Black children. The deictic verbs of motion are examined with reference to other aspects of the deictic system. The data for this study are approximately eight hours of spontaneous speech collected in a pre-school classroom. The hypothesis to…

Three hypotheses were tested: (1) there is no significant difference between the proportions of higher level definitions given by the monolingual students and those of the bilingual students given in English; (2) there is no significant difference between the proportions of higher level definitions given by the monolingual students and those of…

This study investigated the effect of training in general semantics on social adjustment. Acting on the Whorfian Hypothesis that the language structures we use influence our feeling, thinking, and behaving and therefore our social adjustment, the Is of Identity Test and Uncritical Inference Test were used as measures of social adjustment. The…

The semantic differential technique was used in a study involving 40 undergraduate trainees in the area of special education to analyze the concepts "disabled" and "handicapped" and the effects of structured knowledge or definition on the participants' perceptions of and attitudes toward the concepts. The Semantic differential consisted of bipolar…

Verbal analogy items, consisting of an ambiguous stimulus word pair and two unambiguous response word pairs as choice alternatives, were presented to psychology students in a counterbalanced design to discover if preferences existed between the two competing relations in each item. The data were analyzed to see if these preferences ordered…

This paper is a report of two studies of the relationship between intonation and syntax. An analysis of intonation was used to decide whether the pivot-like two-morpheme constructions of a one- and one-half-year-old girl were single lexical items or two separate lexical items. Further, the intonation contours connected with her linguistically…

Originally designed to provide teachers with feedback and also used as a quantitative tool for specifying teacher behavior consistent with a psychological model of teaching described by Tuckman (1974), the Tuckman Teacher Feedback Form (TTFF) is a 28-item semantic differential which generates four scores in the areas of creativity, dynamism…

Two experiments were carried out to see what parts of a sentence are best retained, whether those parts retained best immediately after acquisition are also remembered best after a 48 hour retention interval, and whether or not the parts of a sentence which are retained depend on the semantic and syntactic structure of that sentence. In the first…

It was wished to determine the relative reliabilities of graphic and semantic differential factors to evaluate applicability of two rival models to the measurement of pupil attitudes. Data was collected from a sample of sixth grade pupils on both abstract graphic and typical semantic differential scales. Reliability estimates were constructed from…

The Lexicalist-interpretive approach to inalienable possession adopted in this paper proposes that body parts are generated with either the article (the unmarked determiner) or the possessive adjective (the marked determiner). The unmarked body part is codesignate with the indirect object; in the case of pseudo-transitives--a clearly delimited…