English has gradually become the lingua franca of medical publications and conferences across Europe, with scholars from "smaller" languages opting for English because of the greater scientific impact and prestige associated with a wide international audience; at the same time, however, this transition has disrupted well-established textual…

Chinese characters are used in both Chinese and Japanese writing systems. When literate speakers of either language experience problems in finding or understanding words, they often resort to using Chinese characters or "kanji" (i.e., Chinese characters used in Japanese writing) in their talk, a practice known as "brush talk" ("bitan" in Chinese,…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to provide an analysis and review of the sociotechnical approach as a result of analysis of experiences with the introduction of ICT in higher education. Design/methodology/approach: The experiences of the author with the creation of special web sites in palaeography are analysed paying special attention to…

Every day students are able to discuss complex ideas relatively easily in spontaneous conversation, yet when they attempt to express complex ideas in a written paper, students often experience great difficulty. The features of face-to-face conversation and of written communication differ in a number of respects. This study examines student's…

Dotted Moon is a useful and important resource to complement the range of options available to those teaching and learning Moon. Observation of a variety of Moon readers (including those at early stages of literacy as well as more advanced readers) showed that all participants were able to decode dotted Moon characters and engage in educational…

The emergence of shared symbol systems is considered to be a pivotal moment in human evolution and human development. These changes are normally explained by reference to changes in people's internal cognitive processes. We present 2 experiments which provide evidence that changes in the external, collaborative processes that people use to…

Semantic and orthographic learning of new words was investigated with the help of the picture-word interference (PWI) task. In this version of the Stroop task, picture naming is delayed by the simultaneous presentation of a semantically related as opposed to an unrelated distractor word (a specific PWI effect), as well as by an unrelated word…

Although many dimensions of multimedia are already familiar to technical communicators and educators, producing documents with this technology requires a complete reconceptualization of the communication process. One major obstacle to developing a multimedia rhetoric is the power that print technology holds over people's ideas concerning formal or…

The subject and the object are more strategically assigned than some might readily assume, both as people speak and as they live them. Subjectivity is associated with doing, hence responsibility, and therefore it noticeably slides in matters of credit and blame, with issues like Newton's or LaPlace's discovery. In scientific papers the subject has…

An analysis of adverbial placement in written contemporary English focuses not on the sentence or clause context, as in conventional analyses, but on the textual or discoursal influences on placement. Specifically, the study examines: (1) the major textual and discoursal motivations behind clause-initial placement of adverbials of time and place…

To investigate semantic and syntactic variables in the written language of normally hearing and hearing impaired children, 49 hearing impaired and 49 normally hearing children (10-14 years old) were asked to write compositions based on the Accident/Emergency Picture in the Peabody Language Development Kit. In addition, syntactic characteristics…

(Text is in French.)

Spectographic analysis of speech calls into question two common assumptions of reading teachers: (1) that words are independent units of speech, and (2) that phonemes, the minimal speech sounds needed to change meaning, actually exist. Spectographs reproduce the physical sounds made in speech without any human or psychological interpretation. When…

This paper examines current literature on invented spelling and analyzes its value and use in the course of formal spelling instruction. The paper is divided into four sections which (1) examine the evolution of the term invented spelling; (2) detail spelling strategies and the stages of spelling development; (3) show the relationship between…

Discusses the use of split infinitives in written language and suggests a compromise rule. (RB)