The position this paper assumes views vocabulary not as single words but as phrases, sentences, and sometimes entire segments of discourse that act as single words. This view of vocabulary would be helpful in: (1) bringing the vocabulary aspect of instruction in English as a second language (ESL) closer to current research in language performance,…

A 9-month study of a 1-year-old child's acquisition of the pronunciation of "camera" is presented. The data show that while the child can articulate and perceive all the phonological segments of the adult form, she uses an idiosyncratic child-based form when she spontaneously draws from her lexicon to produce an utterance, systematically modifying…

Recent research in psycholinguistics shows that experience with language in its communicative function is essential for learning to speak a second language. A suitable linguistic environment provides for the development of strategies for aural comprehension and for the acquisition of means of expression. A different approach to curriculum is…

Within the framework of a general model of communication, a model of language communication has been developed and applied to the perception of cohesion. To measure students' perception of textual cohesion, a pilot study in the United Kingdom built "noise" into texts by deleting parts of each texts. Subjects, 59 nonremedial students whose first…

A case study in second language learning was conducted by the researcher on herself in a specific sociolinguistic context, Trinidad, and with reference to a specific first and second language relationship, standard English and Trinidadian English Creole. The study attempted to: (1) demonstrate the complexity of social, cultural, psychological, and…

To answer important questions for educators concerning language skills, this paper argues that children must acquire new skills in order to process written language, and that the need for developing new skills stems from differences between oral and written language that are more fundamental than differences in mode. The paper first describes how…

Punctuation serves as a system of visual markers that contradict previously generated false grammatical expectations. Word order conditions define the redundant or critical aspect of punctuation cues to visual display. Parsing (grouping) sentences into meaningful phrases and clauses aids language comprehension, and children who have reading…

A study is presented which investigated ways Spanish speaking preschool children learn to identify letters of the alphabet, the types of errors made in identifying letters, and whether there is a developmental learning sequence in alphabet learning for Spanish speakers. The question of the influence of socioeconomic level on performance was also…

One of the prevalent misconceptions that severely limits the possibilities of curriculum change in schools is the belief that theory has no direct relevance to pedagogical problems and that what is really needed are practical ideas for classroom instruction. Serious curriculum change requires an explicit dependence upon improved applications of…

Described in this report is a longitudinal study that examined the transition that children make from oral to written texts in respect to their use of cohesive devices and particular story structure elements in two modes of oral and one mode of written language. The first section provides an overview of the study and discusses literacy…

The 10 articles in this book examine how comprehension is affected by what the reader brings to the text, the manner in which the text is structured by the author, and the contextual variables that shape the meaning derived by the reader. Specific topics covered in the articles are (1) background knowledge and comprehension, (2) learning how to…

A study investigated the process of information extraction in reading in order to determine whether language constraints in texts reduced the amount of visual detail noticed by the reader during the reading of specific words. A detailed examination was made of 20 college students' eye movement patterns as they read a group of selected passages.…

Many linguists have maintained that the pronouns "he,""his," and "him" and the noun "man," when used in the generic sense, legitimately refer to both males and females and effectively cue readers to think of both. Others have argued, however, that the generic terms cause readers to "filter out" or…

Noting that the lack of prosodic information in printed text may be a source of difficulty for children who are learning to read, this paper explores the features of language underlying the acoustic and perceptual segmentation of sentences into meaningful units. Using evidence from studies in speech production and perception, the paper addresses…

As part of a series of studies dealing with varieties of interference in sentence learning as assessed by multiple choice tests, a study was undertaken to explore the effects of pictures on inferentially produced interference in recognition memory for sentence information. The subjects were 104 first grade students and 104 fourth, fifth, and sixth…