Purpose: This final article covering the topic of the interplay between decoding, comprehension, and content versus structure knowledge describes a set of language initiatives that are focused toward content area learning. Inspired by the work of their colleagues from diverse fields and their own work, the authors offer suggestions to clinicians…

SUBJECTS OF AGES 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, AND 20 RETOLD STORIES PRESENTED IN FULL PASSIVE SENTENCES (WITH MENTION OF ACTOR) AND TRUNCATED PASSIVES (WITHOUT MENTION OF ACTOR). WHILE THERE WAS A GENERAL TENDENCY TO RETELL STORIES IN THE ACTIVE VOICE, THIS TENDENCY WAS MUCH MORE EVIDENT IN THE CASE OF FULL THAN TRUNCATED PASSIVES. IT IS PROPOSED THAT THE…

A COMPREHENSIVE MODEL OF LANGUAGE SHOULD ACCOUNT FOR ENTIRE DISCOURSES. BY REGARDING THE UNDERLYING STRUCTURE OF DISCOURSE AS A COLLECTION OF TREES GENERATED BY A PREDICATE GRAMMAR AND RELATED TO EACH OTHER ON THE BASIS OF FOCUS, IT APPEARS POSSIBLE TO FIT A MODEL TO LINGUISTIC BEHAVIOR BOTH ABOVE AND BELOW THE LEVEL OF THE SENTENCE. THE BASE OF…

This paper first briefly reviews what Halliday and Hasan (1976) said about "(the) same." The paper then examines the understanding of this form by qualitatively analyzing 259 naturally occurring spoken tokens of "(the) same" in their discourse contexts. It focuses on the following questions with reference to the data: (1) What…

In agreement with prior studies, syntactic order produced better recall, and recall errors were semantically related to the narrative. The more vivid versions of the paragraphs produced higher recall suggesting that imagery may play a role in recall. (Authors)

Special issue on translation. (VM)

Investigates the role of paragraph markings in text: how informative paragraph cues are and how they affect interpretation. Reports one study asking subjects to reinstate deleted paragraph markings. Reports a second study examining the effect of paragraph boundaries on reading time, ratings, and judgment of important ideas in the text. (JAD)

The category of coherence in rating scales has often been criticized for being vague. Typical descriptors might describe students' writing as having 'a clear progression of ideas' or "lacking logical sequencing." These descriptors inevitably require subjective interpretation on the side of the raters. A number of researchers (Connor & Farmer,…

What should college English be? This author contends that college English should be the intersection of the various areas of discourse that shape thought and produce knowledge. It should be the study of the mixing and remixing of connections: those connections that move from popular culture to the university, from geography to politics, from…

This study examined the representation of knowledge in text writing in 20 ten-year-old children and 20 adults in the Netherlands. The research analyzed the use of clause linking devices to compose larger text units. Special attention was given to the use of causal relational markers and the extent to which causal relations within the texts matched…

There is considerable evidence from psycholinguistics that first language listeners handle function words differently from content words. This makes intuitive sense because content words require the listener to access a lexical meaning representation whereas function words do not. A separate channel of processing for functors would enable them to…

ONE GROUP OF 16 SS (SUBJECTS) WAS GIVEN A RANDOMIZED LIST OF WORDS THAT CONTAINED EIGHT SERIES OF FOUR ASSOCIATIVELY RELATED NOUNS, WHILE ANOTHER GROUP OF 16 SS WAS GIVEN A RANDOMIZED LIST OF WORDS THAT CONTAINED EIGHT SERIES OF FOUR ASSOCIATIVELY UNRELATED NOUNS, AND THE TASK FOR BOTH GROUPS WAS TO WRITE A STORY THAT CONTAINED THE NOUNS FROM THE…

This study was designed to investigate children's ability to use semantic syntax in connection with two types of meanings of polysemantic words. One hundred fourth graders ranked the familiarity of multiple definitions of 60 words given in a semantic survey. Those 34 words found to have common meanings or obscure meanings were used to construct a…