This study compared the abilities of 30 sixth-grade, competent readers and 30 adult, competent readers to process syntactic structures under conditions of related and unrelated discourse. Results suggest the ability to process syntactic and semantic elements is not fully developed in children in the 11- to 12-year range. (Author/SJL)

Discusses the ellipsis of major sentential elements as a pervasive grammatical phenomenon in Japanese conversation and demonstrates its relevance for current theories of discourse or text analysis. (FL)

The effects of manipulating the connective words "because" and "after" on fifth graders' reading comprehension was examined. The results provide no support for the notion that sentence length is related to comprehensibility or that implicit connectives are more difficult to comprehend. (HOD)

Reports an experiment which supports the predictions of the accommodative-reconstruction hypothesis that recall is not based on retrieval of stored traces of interpreted experience. It involves accommodating details of what is to be remembered to what is known at the time of recall. (PMJ)

The following topics are developed: (1) the problematic aspect of the analysis of French discourse, an introduction to methods, theories and applications; (2) the proposals of M. Pecheux; (3) precisions to render operative definitions derived in the proposals; (4) the Macciocchi manner of speaking; and (5) the Peyrefitte manner of speaking. (AMH)

Investigates whether frequent story retellings with structural guidance can improve kindergarten children's use of structural elements and increase the oral language complexity in dictating original stories. Finds support for retelling as an instructional strategy. (RS)

This article explores the connections between conversation demands and the ability of children who stutter to maintain fluency. A model of conversation management useful both in assessment and intervention is introduced. The three-component model considers competencies at the utterance level, suprasegmental level, and discourse level. (Author/JDD)

Describes a set of metadiscourse functions arising from the use of contrastive and non-contrastive expressions in academic argumentation. Describes interpersonal metadiscourse functions of connectives within argumentative essays. Proposes that interpersonal uses of connectives mitigate counterclaims and emphasize claims based on the assumed roles…

This paper offers a rationale for the use of conversational approaches to teach language to deaf students, encourages teachers to reexamine how they teach and how they structure their classrooms and curriculums, and describes activities that teachers can use to encourage conversation in their classrooms. (Author/JDD)

This article compares ordinary conversational topics and targeted second language (L2) forms for their effectiveness in building and maintaining classroom discourse cohesion. In this study, 16 learners participated in 2 lessons, 1 with teacher turns determined by a grammatical object of instruction, and the other with turns determined by…

A group with closed head injury was compared to neurologically intact controls regarding the referential cohesion and logical coherence of narrative production. A sample of six stories was obtained with tasks of cartoon-elicited story-telling and auditory-oral retelling. We found deficits in the clinical group with respect to referential cohesion,…

Pronominal referencing was evaluated in a sample of 569 children comprising four diagnostic subgroups: typical language (TL), specific language impairment (SLI), nonspecific language impairment (NLI), and typical language with low nonverbal IQ (LNIQ). Participants generated oral narratives in second grade and again in fourth grade. The narratives…

A review of the relevant literature reveals that reading reversals, whether in sequence or orientation, comprise a very small proportion of the total errors made by even poor readers. Young children tend to make more reversals, yet this tendency generally disappears with age. Top-down theorists feel that the reversal tendency of young children is…

To explore the concept of lexical collocation, or relationships between words, a study was conducted based on three assumptions: (1) that a text structure for a unit of discourse was analogous to that existing at the level of the sentence, (2) that such a text form could be discovered if a large enough sample of generically similar texts was…

Sentence-by-sentence analysis of factual or propositional cohesion in the first 29 lines of a Swedish children's story finds several sources of coherence that contribute to its cohesion. First, the text receives much coherence from its description of a single event, a situation where happenings are normal and expected. Second, a rather primitive…