Examination of a two-year-old's early determiner-noun combinations suggested that early article use can be distributed across a variety of nouns, and that such usage does not seem appropriately characterized as a pattern of limited semantic scope. (CB)

Applies a theoretical framework that encompasses cultural and social regulation of mother-child speech to observations of discourse between three mothers and their two-year-olds. Maternal speech was semantically contingent in the sense that both partners in the conversation were jointly focused on a shared topic of concern. (Author/CB)

This study used semantic differential scales to compare the perceptions of male librarians among undergraduates, graduate students, and university librarians. It was found that male librarians believe that they are viewed in a negative light, while other respondents reported positive perceptions of male librarians. (40 references) (Author/CLB)

Investigates the processes involved in the learning of Arabic subject-verb agreement by Australians. It is hypothesized that the amount and direction of information encoding motivated by certain semantic categories as well as the availability of discourse cues would influence the learners' performance in subject-verb agreement tasks. (27…

Describes the role of natural language processing (NLP) techniques, such as parsing and semantic analysis, within current language tutoring systems. Examines trends, design issues and tradeoffs, and potential contributions of NLP techniques with respect to instructional theory and educational practice. Addresses limitations and problems in using…

Explores the semantics and pragmatics of indefinite descriptions. It is argued that indefinite descriptions are not semantically ambiguous and that their various interpretations may be explained on the basis of general communicative principles. He shows that his proposed analysis can account for generic and predicative interpretations. (45…

Studied the possibility that a frontal lisp in a seven-year-old girl resulted in negative attitudes among her second grade peers. Results suggest that a frontal lisp influences the judgment of a child's peers, and especially female peers, so that they make a more negative evaluation of the child with a lisp. (BB)

Discusses semantic communication networks, methods of content analysis, and voice mail as a communication system. A study that examined conceptual distinctions between voice mail answering and voice mail messaging in a large insurance organization is described, and semantic network analysis is compared to traditional content analysis. (28…

Analyzes the use of language in two British and Australian secondary school textbooks and a corpus of written British English of one million words. Significant differences were found in the distribution of syntactic patterns in the two books, and these differences are discussed as evidence of the ideological stances expressed in the books.…

Tests whether nominal compounds, the juxtaposition of three or more nouns, retain sufficient semantic information to justify their use for brevity. Finds that respondents often misidentified at least one out of five given headwords. Recommends reminding students of headwords' importance and employing nominal compounds only after their fuller…

Investigates the degree to which children and adult readers use semantic and syntactic information sources to increase speed of word recognition and to increase speed of determining sentence meaningfulness. Finds three developmental differences in the speed of analyzing these sentences for words/nonwords versus meaningfulness/nonmeaningfulness.…

A correlational study examined the relationship between test performance and four study processes (encoding, word meaning, organizing, and executive control). Results with 123 college freshmen trained to use study strategies suggest that executive control is related to test performance and that trained subjects select a variety of strategies…

This paper reviews research findings on the structural properties of deaf childrens' gestural communication systems and evaluates those properties in the context of data gained from other approaches to the question of the young child's language-making capacity. (over 100 references) (JL)

Argues that translation can be an effective learning tool for English speakers learning Chinese if semantic and discourse analysis are incorporated. Examples are given to illustrate various problems in such translation, including the division between state and action verbs, and the nonuse of -LE with verbs in past meaning. (15 references) (JL)

Evidence from a sample of informal written language (personal correspondence) shows that the most important constraints on pronoun usage in subject position are discourse-based. The quantitative analysis supports the hypothesis that pronoun usage is "functional" since semantically relevant information is preserved in surface structure.…