A study examined language learners' ability to integrate information from sentence contexts and semantic decomposition in interpreting novel kanji compounds (i.e., words consisting of two or more Japanese characters). Subjects, 59 English-speaking college students learning Japanese, inferred the meanings of 72 unknown compounds consisting of…

Papers from the conference on semantics and linguistic theory include the following: "Definiteness, Existentials, and the 'List' Interpretation" (Barbara Abbott); "Strong and Weak Novelty and Familiarity" (Cleo Condoravdi); "The Singular-Plural Distinction in Hindi Generics" (Veneeta Srivastav Dayal);" Adverbial…

The serial verb construction (SVC) in Edo (Bini), a language spoken in Nigeria, is examined, and an analysis that systematically characterizes the notion of functional relationship of verbs within these constructions is proposed. It is argued that the verbs in series are sensitive to different semantic and grammatical phenomena and are therefore…

When response set is present, instead of responding to the intent of the question, the subject appears to be responding to a variable emanating from some personal characteristic. This threat to measurement reliability and validity warrants investigation of the source of response set so that questionnaire designers can minimize its occurrence. This…

Within a psycholinguistic approach to second language learning, an attempt is made to investigate the question of how morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics affect the comprehension of Dutch sentences by nonnative learners of that language. When talking to nonnative language-learners, native speakers often tend to deliberately modify their…

Concepts in cognitive psychology are applied to the language used in military situations, and a sentence classification system for use in analyzing military language is outlined. The system is designed to be used, in part, in conjunction with a natural language query system that allows a user to access a database. The discussion of military…

Examples are given of real lexical errors made by learner writers, and consideration is given to the way in which three learners' dictionaries could deal with the lexical items that were misused. The dictionaries were the "Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary," the "Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English," and the "Chambers Universal Learners'…

The Setswana language possesses a verbal prefix that, according to some grammarians of the language such as D. T. Cole, is categorized as the reflexive prefix, closely allied to objectival concords. If the morphology suggests that this morpheme be characterized as a reflexive object prefix, it does not always give expected results in its semantic…

This paper examines the Turkish origins of a number of Cypriot-Greek words, explaining how some of these words have undergone a semantic shift. Words of Turkish origin can be divided into three classes: (1) culturally borrowed, those words that introduced a new concept into Cypriot-Greek and have no purely Greek equivalent; (2) doublets, those…

In standard American English, the word "like" has several senses associated with it, the earliest of which dates to the 14th century. Some meanings reflect recent developments in the language and suggest that the lexical aspects of the word are changing toward a more grammatical function. Analysis of historical information and data collected in…

Folk etymology is defined as a change in word or phrase form resulting from an incorrect popular idea of its origin or meaning. Irregular phonetic-semantic shifts are produced by inter-language borrowing or by intra-language passage from one period to another. These shifts are more common in periods when there are no, or few, normative factors…

Automatic processing of word meaning by bilingual children was studied in a picture/word interference task. Thirty elementary and junior high students, fluent in French and English, named pictures as rapidly as possible while attempting to ignore distractor words printed inside the pictures' borders. The printed distractors interfered with naming…

A Chinese student of English is often faced with culturally based differences in denotation and connotation, idioms and proverbs, habits, and formulaic use of language. Since the native speaker of any language has built into his language repertoire his unique cultural assumptions and values, a culture-oriented curriculum in language teaching is…

Designed to analyze systematically the relative effects of different types of oral reading errors on comprehension, this instrument consists of a basic set (each with an easy and a hard version) of six stories. Every story is transformed so that it contains simulated errors of a particular type: (1) correct, (2) semantically related visually…

The author argues that unless Kohlberg's theory of moral development can be demonstrated empirically, based on scientific evidence, his ensuing plan for a program of moral education amounts to no more than a systematic program of indoctrination. Kohlberg identifies the moral stage of a person by eliciting from a subject the reasons referred to in…