Reports two studies which found a relationship between awareness of word order in sentences and reading readiness and achievement for children in kindergarten through third grade. Suggests this type of metalinguistic awareness may be important to early reading because it helps children to detect meaningful relationships between words. (Author/CB)

The influence of changes in wording of simple arithmetic problems without affecting semantic structure on the level of difficulty for primary-grade students was investigated. Data analysis produced results that rewording the problem so that the semantic relations are made more explicit facilitates the construction of an appropriate mental…

Reviews concepts from discourse analysis and translates them into instructional techniques that can be used in the classroom to improve reading comprehension. (FL)

When asked to read and write a given story, 20 hearing students recalled significantly larger numbers of propositions than 20 deaf high school students, but both deaf and hearing students recalled similiar numbers of story inferences in their written narratives. (Author/CL)

Learning disabled (LD) and non-LD boys (grades two and six) were given a false recognition task. Study and test items were manipulated to form visual, acoustic, and semantic distractors. Results suggest that LD students do not spontaneously use the effortful semantic processing strategy of elaborative rehearsal. (Author/CL)

Regardless of the syntactic variation of the direct object "a" in Spanish, a great deal of semantic unity underlies its use. Argues that it carries an invariant meaning that is present in every use of the form, and, concomitantly, its absence before a direct object carries an equally invariant meaning within the systematic semantic structure of…

The acquisition of "to" in infinitive complement structure was examined in the spontaneous speech data from four children who were observed longitudinally from two to three years of age. Results support the conclusion that the verb system is a determining factor in the acquisition of linguistic structure. (SED)

Semantic discourse features of written narratives of 49 hearing impaired children (10-15 years old) were examined in an analysis of the relationship between form and meaning in the writing of both hearing and hearing impaired Ss. Syntactic and semantic written language growth appear to be qualitatively and quantitatively different in the groups.…

Spatial relationships represented by po + dative case in Russian may be analyzed as underlying locations. The directionality sometimes present in po + dative sentences is due to the cooccurrence of the directional (determined) verb of motion and not to an underlying relation goal. (SL)

Multitrait-Multimethod analysis and confirmatory factor analysis were used to investigate differences in Likert, Thurstone, and Semantic Differential techniques. Results indicated that these measurement techniques are not completely interchangeable. (JKS)

Of all the studies examining recognition of semantically related words, none has systematically varied lag to test the straightforward prediction of a monotonic decrease in false alarms to new words semantically related to prior words. The present experiment, using semantic associates, tested this prediction. (Author)

The use of the terms "sensitivity, threshold, bias, and ratio scale" in psychophysics is discussed, with special reference to the statistical decision theory of sensory discrimination and its application to signal detection and classical psychophysical procedures. (Editor)

Presents a more precise analysis of the way in which semantic constraints affect the perception of reversible sentences. (Author/RK)

Formal semantic analysis appears to be capable of handling certain cases where kin terms appear to cover an illogical assortment of relatives, an assortment which constitutes a disjunctive class. Two examples are the kin terms "ngaraija" and "tjilja," used by the Njamal, an Australian tribe. (CFM)

Questions the current distinction between semantics and pragmatics, and develops a theory of "argumentative scales" (Ducrot 1973), as well as a semantic model with three components and a revision of the notion of "illocutionary." (Text is in French.) (CDSH/AM)