Language characteristics of 11 children (ages 6-8) with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and 11 typically developing children were compared for semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic language skills. Findings indicated no differences on receptive vocabulary, but children with ADHD performed worse on tests of expressive speech and…

Describes an exercise in lexical analysis, involving verbs of sound in English and Spanish. The aim of the exercise is to enable students to discover underlying patterns of meaning that are representative of lexical-conceptual structure. (Author/VL)

Helps teacher and students investigate the history and hidden meanings of the word "tribe." Pretests and posttests gauge students' knowledge and assumptions about the word. Discusses what is wrong with the word, why it is used so often if it is so flawed, and common arguments for its continued. Sidebars present resources and a discussion…

Describes a multimedia approach to solving image retrieval problems. Presents the idea of a media agent, which can automatically collect semantic descriptions of multimedia data into a personal media database on behalf of a particular user whenever and wherever he/she accesses these multimedia data. Discusses implementation and applications of the…

Evaluation of the role of concreteness and familiarity in the development of proverb comprehension in 180 students in grades 5, 8, and 11 found that both concreteness and familiarity as well as student age, influenced comprehension. Results support the "metasemantic" and the "language experience" hypotheses of language comprehension development.…

Presents the Semantic Distance Model (SDM) of Relevance Assessment, a cognitive model of the relationship between semantic distance and relevance assessment. Discusses premises of the model such as the subjective nature of information and the metaphor of semantic distance. Empirical results illustrate the effects of semantic distance and semantic…

Discusses part of a large-scale survey on the oral performance of advanced French-as-a-second-language students, as represented by recorded speech. Although schwa rarely leads to semantic confusions, its analysis in word-median or monosyllabic contexts shows interesting phonostylistic variations. (Author/VWL)

Examines naturalistic adult-to-child speech of Italian middle class mothers to determine which patterns characterize linguistic input to infants. Because Italian is a pro-drop language, adult-to-child speech revealed bias toward more salient semantic and morphological significance of verbs relative to nouns, and verbs will likely occupy…

Describes a system called CINDI (Concordia INdexing and DIscovery System) for cataloging and searching documents in a distributed virtual library. The document author registers metadata in the form of a semantic header that contains information on syntactic and semantic content, and an expert system fills the semantic header according to accepted…

Aims to foster discussion of the means by which bilinguals control their two language systems. Proposes an inhibitory control model that embodies the principle that there are multiple levels of control. The model is used to expand the explanation of the effect of category blocking in translation proposed by Kroll and Stewart (1994). (Author/VWL)

In this study, it is indicated that there is a statistically significant semantic relationship between highly cited publications and their citing publications in comparison to highly cited publications with no citing relationship, within the same topic literature. Visualizing this set of data, however, shows that citation-based data represents…

Investigates the acquisition of temporality in English by Korean speakers over a period of 24 months. Temporality is examined from two perspectives: the expression of past-time events and semantic aspect and verb morphology. Results are discusses. (Author/VWL)

Alzheimer's disease (AD) subjects, healthy elderly, and young adults interpreted a series of novel noun-noun expressions composed of familiar object words. Subjects interpreted each item by selecting one of three possible definitions: a definition in which the referents of each noun were associated together in a particular context (e.g., rabbit…

The "Critical Thinking and the Art of Close Reading" series (which includes this column and three others) focuses on some of the most basic understandings necessary for close reading (Paul & Elder, 2003). To read well, in addition to having these understandings, students must be able to identify the big picture within a text, to determine the key…

What is the role of oral language in reading competence during the transition to school? Is oral language in preschool best conceptualized as vocabulary knowledge or as more comprehensive language including grammar, vocabulary, and semantics? These questions were examined longitudinally using 1,137 children from the National Institute of Child…