A role analysis study of the Margaret I. King Library reference department focused on organization of role activities, their evaluation by reference staff, and patron satisfaction. Observation, interview, and questionnaire techniques were employed to (1) obtain staff job history and academic training; (2) inventory activities from which a list of…

Basic information that teachers of English as a second language should know about Indochinese refugees, including the identification of different ethnic or regional groups and characteristics of four Indochinese languages, is presented. Indochinese refugees come from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. The five major groups of people are unrelated…

The "yes/no" method of vocabulary assessment requires students to indicate words they know from among a list of words and nonwords. Preliminary evidence gained from a study involving fifth grade students indicates that the method is superior in many ways to the multiple choice method of assessment. Analysis of "false alarms," cases in which…

Problems related to the structure of the mental lexicon are considered. The single access assumption, the passive memory assumption, and the heterogeneous memory assumption are rejected in favor of the theory which assumes several active memories, each able to store expression based on only one homogenous set of abstract primitives. One lexicon…

Principles of language assessment and instruction for Spanish speaking preschoolers at St. Mary's Hospital in Tucson, Arizona, are presented. Basic definitions and program model (which looks at the child's communication skills based purely on semantic content contained in spontaneous language samples) are explained. The program's theoretical bases…

Papers that address implications of linguistic theory for applied linguistics are presented. In "Some Semantic Properties of Some Conjunctions," W. Abraham is concerned with the function of "but" and its translation equivalents in German and other languages. In "Is It Possible and Necessary to Write Text Grammars?," T. P. Krzeszowski examines the…

Overviews of schema theory, which focuses on the cognitive operations engaged in by the reader, and discourse analysis, which focuses on structural characteristics of the text itself, are presented in this paper. The first section explains the notion of cognitive schemata (patterns of expectations that are applied to incoming information) and…

This research discusses the probability of child witnesses providing a complete and accurate description of an event. Children have been regarded as particularly inaccurate, highly suggestible, and basically unreliable in court cases. Psychologists have concluded that younger children are much more suggestible than older children or adults, and a…

This paper describes part of a larger study dealing with syntax and semantics of the child's early speech about motion and location. It suggests that goal, defined as the point at which a motion ends and a resulting locative state begins, is the organizing principle for the semantics of motion and location. The data presented here are from two…

This work treats some of the important issues encountered in an attempt to synthesize natural sounding English speech from arbitrary written text. Details of the systems that interact in producing speech are described. The principal systems dealt with are phonology (intonation), phonetics, syntax, semantics, and text-view (discourse). Technical…

A study was designed to examine an underlying assumption regarding the use of the semantic differential in measuring the credibility and homophily of a communicator, namely, that responses to an ideal source position themselves at one extreme end of the scale, reflecting the monotonic function of the instrument such that the highest response…

Speech performance data, including hesitations in the stream of speech, fragmented words or phrases, retracings, and the use of intonation contours for noncommunicative purposes, are examined. It is proposed that these types of speech phenomena are indicative of underlying hypothesis testing and utterance planning strategies. Data produced by 48…

A study of the influence of English on modern Finnish was designed to determine how Anglicisms are used, how they are understood, and how they are adapted to the Finnish language system. Features of present-day Finnish were analyzed to discover to what extent the Finnish language and the Finns' sense of language are changing. Anglicisms were…

The reduction of existing lexical items to shorter forms has generally been discussed under the headings of "acronyms,""back-formations," and "clippings." Two kinds of acronym are found, the letter-naming type (e.g. FBI, YMCA) and the letter-sounding type (e.g. UNESCO, CARE). The latter type must be pronounceable within the phonotactic norms of…

This paper describes a study of the relationship between terminology in psychological studies and prevailing social conditions at the time of the studies. It is proposed that researchers reflect societal concerns by their choice of semantic markers (terminology). Over 3,000 psychological studies from 1900-72 were analyzed in terms of their…