A non-verbal 12-year-old boy with low functioning autism was tested on an auditory word-to-picture selection task. Picture foils were chosen to have visual features, semantic features, both, or neither in common with the correct answer. Errors were made more often to semantically than to visually related items. (Contains references.) (Author/CR)

Demonstrates how, by following the presumed and attested historical development of the German relative clause, students can be led through the formation of the structure in a simple three-step progression using familiar operations that impart the clause's various functions and meanings. (Author/CB)

Examines how native and second-language English speakers interpret reflexive anaphores and pronominals in certain sentence types. Interpreting anaphores was more difficult overall and a consistent order of difficulty was found for five different sentence types. Results are discussed in the context of the Parameterized Binding Theory and the Subset…

The analysis of 2,369 finite clauses in 11 English-language academic articles on oceanography attempts to establish the semantic characteristics of "by" phrases as a step toward understanding the circumstances in which authors were likely to use the prepositional phrase following a passive verb form. (CB)

Problems and techniques in teaching the translation of idioms that make little or no sense literally are examined, using as an example the translation of a French idiom into German. Use of bilingual dictionaries and other related activities to deepen and enrich understanding of the language are stressed. (MSE)

Describes an alternate lexico-semantic view of native language acquisition and adult second language learning that proposes that humans acquire and learn words, names, titles, expressions, sayings, and formulas as undifferentiated lexical items first and then develop systems to store and retrieve the lexemes and combine them into phrases and…

Results support previous findings that the competence to reason deductively becomes available in adolescence. Prior to the availability of this competence, performance is poor regardless of the relevance of propositional content. A clear developmental progression was evident between Grades 6 and 12; 16 percent of sixth graders were classified as…

Outlines an initial framework, five orientations and eight dimensions, based on information derived from the study of text analysis. Maintains that art education researchers need a multilayered framework to facilitate design of research that addresses the analysis of complex multidimensional data. (KM)

Linguistic performance of 7 children (mean age=68 months) with spina bifida, hydrocephalus, and average intelligence was evaluated. Subjects dealt with the semantic-pragmatic requirements of linguistically posed problems in an age-appropriate manner. Performance declined as task demands increased but no more than performance of nondisabled…

Describes experiments that compared a new method for automatically analyzing semantic structures in text by statistical means with the standard vector space model. Findings indicate that combining both methods improved performance over either alone. The effects of other experimental variables on retrieval performance (term weighting, suffix…

Discussion of the notion of readability focuses on predicting readability with computerized readability formulas. Semantic and syntactic factors are discussed, the development of readability formulas is described, and five commercially available computer readability formulas are reviewed, including the Readability Estimator, Readability Formulas,…

Discusses the field of instructional systems technology (IST) and the definition of its subject matter domain; describes cognitive mapping and semantic relatedness; and reports results of a study that generated a cognitive map to define the structure of research and theory in IST. (three references) (LRW)

Examining the existence of an identifiable domain of adult education, this article considers the increasing diversity of practice, the methodological and philosophical problems involved, changing concepts and aims of adult education, and the current climate of relativism. Proposes the concept of tradition, which helps define paradigms that change…

Argues that competence in academic subjects depends on mastery of their specialized patterns of language use. These patterns are described in terms of: 1) the semantics underlying Halliday's functional linguistics and 2) the structural analysis of communication genres. A sample classroom episode illustrates relationships among semantic…

Severely hearing-impaired students (n=187, ages 7-23) at eight reading levels were evaluated to determine their ability to comprehend common English modals. Although subjects' modal comprehension improved with reading level, subjects at the highest reading levels did not demonstrate complete mastery of modals. Modals tended to be acquired in a…