According to recent neurolinguistic theories and research, language and other analytic functions are located on the left side of the brain, while spatial and configurational abilities are located on the right side. However, there is some evidence that while learning a language requires the use of both hemispheres of the brain, the right hemisphere…

Theoretical issues related to the parallel role of internal revision in reading and writing are explored in this paper, which explains that meanings generated during reading or writing are always tentative and that readers and writers must build and maintain a continuous text world. The paper next examines criteria for evaluating the continuity of…

The relationship of readability, "readable writing" techniques, and comprehension was evaluated in a series of five experiments involving United States Navy recruits. Eight expository passages from a standardized reading test were revised by using word lists to simplify the vocabulary and a restriction in syntactic structure to simplify…

An error analysis of the oral production of Korean adults learning English was performed on informant speech samples, using Corder's Algorithm for providing data for description of idiosyncratic dialects as a guide for determing error. The procedures of error analysis and morpheme acquisition studies were combined to address the following…

Forced-choice items, investigating the performance of 80 undergraduates on verbal classification and verbal analogy, were sequentially presented, allowing independent estimates of the accuracy of four principle component processes: inference, application, recognition, and distraction. Within-task performance showed substantial individual variation…

Various communication studies have revealed the existence of a "preverbal" stage of communication consisting of centers within the brain that exists in an innate form or a form preprogrammed for future information acquired from the environment through experience (socialization). Such centers serve to prepare the individual for…

A study examined cognitive processing differences between metaphoric and literal sentences. Thirty-three undergraduate students listened to 96 test sentences (including 48 fillers) that expressed 1 meaning in either a novel or frozen metaphorical or literal form: "The old couch was in love with its new slipcover" (novel), "The old couch was at…

Behaviorism cannot adequately explain language processing. A synthesis of the psycholinguistic and information processing approaches of cognitive psychology, however, can provide the basis for a speculative analysis of reading, if this synthesis is tempered by a perceptual learning theory of uncertainty reduction. Theorists of information…

A study was conducted to examine some of the cognitive and linguistic factors that influence metaphor comprehension in young children. Presupposing that (1) the similarities between the topic and the vehicle in a metaphor comprise the metaphor's ground, (2) salience is the degree of prominence of a characteristic in relation to a concept, and (3)…

The techniques for effective listening can be identified by the acronym PAT, which stands for three sets of techniques--physical, attitude, and thinking. Four kinds of physical techniques promote effective listening: appropriate eye contact and normal blinking rate, facial feedback, appropriate body language, and appropriate verbal feedback. Two…

The sentence processing abilities of a conduction aphasic adult woman with a documented phonological coding deficit were investigated in tests of auditory and visual sentence comprehension of reversible active and passive sentences and spatial prepositions, sentence production through story completion and picture description, and repetition of…

Studies in psychology, language, and foreign language suggest that it is the qualitative nature of the task students perform while learning that is important, because of the creativity factor. Some explanations of creativity are concerned with hemisphericity of the brain. Another explanation is that creativity results from divergent rather than…

H.P. Grice's theory of conversation can be used effectively to teach revision in composition courses because it teaches students the rules for effective writing. Grice has formulated a general principle, the Cooperative Principle, based on the assumption that talk-exchanges among speakers are "cooperative efforts" having "a common…

The following papers are included: (1) "The Theoretical and Practical Relevance of Simple Codes in Second Language Acquisition" (Krashen); (2) "Talking to Foreigners versus Talking to Children: Similarities and Differences" (Freed); (3) "The Levertov Machine" (Stevick); (4) "Acquiring a Second Language when You're Not the Underdog" (Edelsky and…

A study investigated the immediate comprehension processes involved in the interpretation of English idiomatic expressions. Idioms such as "bury the hatchet" were presented to 48 college students in sentential contexts that either biased the subject toward a literal or a figurative interpretation or left the interpretation ambiguous. In control…