This paper critically examines one particular issue against the background of changes in South Africa's higher education system consequent upon the advent of a non-racial democracy--the possibility of implementing multilingual instructional polices that include indigenous African languages in its universities. Currently, a great deal of applied…

English learners of French whose first language (L1) does not mark the perfective/imperfective distinction have shown verb semantic influence and an overall preference for perfective over imperfective in their use of second language (L2) tense-aspect markers. This study investigated whether learners whose L1 marks the perfective/imperfective…

This study addresses the response of social science and engineering science faculty to a naturally occurring sample of second language writing. Using a matched-guise protocol, faculty participants were led to believe that the one-page essay was produced by an international student whose first language was either Chinese or Spanish. The faculty…

This article investigates the vocabulary of textbooks and relates it to education policy, assessment methods and teaching methods. It considers the range of vocabulary covered by key stages 3 and 4 German foreign language textbooks for secondary schools from the beginning of the 1990s to 2006 and shows that there is an overall decrease in the…

Latent semantic analysis (LSA) is an automated, statistical technique for comparing the semantic similarity of words or documents. In this article, I examine the application of LSA to automated essay scoring. I compare LSA methods to earlier statistical methods for assessing essay quality, and critically review contemporary essay-scoring systems…

Background: The psychosocial impact of acquired dysarthria on the speaker is well recognized. To date, speech-and-language therapists have no instrument available to measure this construct. This has implications for outcome measurement and for planning intervention. This paper describes the Dysarthria Impact Profile (DIP), an instrument that has…

The sheer quantity of words known (breadth) is strongly predictive of reading comprehension, yet little is understood about how quality of word knowledge (depth) affects comprehension. A group of 35 bilingual and monolingual 5th-grade students worked on developing depth of knowledge of 8 words, culminating in an activity in which the students…

Recent research in psychology and neuroscience has demonstrated that co-speech gestures are semantically integrated with speech during language comprehension and development. The present study explored whether gestures also play a role in language learning in adults. In Experiment 1, we exposed adults to a brief training session presenting novel…

This article aims to discover the latent organization of a text by revealing a semantically motivated pattern of language functions that inform the theme of a story. it is shown how this pattern of linguistic features in the text provides insights into the literary effects of a description of a scene of a novel. The analysis proposed follows the…

An analysis of semantically ergative languages begins with a description of the essential results of research on ergativity to date, and an outline of the assumptions and conceptual apparatus on which the analysis is based. Subsequently, data from 20 Daghestanian languages, primarily Archi, are examined for evidence of the syntactic features of…

The difficulties presented by the semantic baggage that a word/phrase carries as it is translated from one language (French) into another language (Greek) are discussed. Numerous examples of these difficulties, drawn from magazines and works of fiction, are provided. The phenomenon of linguistic borrowing is highlighted. (SR)

It is argued that mastery of verbal aspect in Russian calls for the development in the student of a novel pattern of linguistic perception for actions and occurrences. (Author/RM)

The principal nominal deictic affixes of Bella Coola, a Salishan language of British Columbia, are examined. (Author/RM)

Article investigated the differences in responses of blacks and whites to the MMPI. (Author/RK)

Provides commentaties to the linguistic articles in the anthology "Presuppositions in Philosophy and Linguistics" (1973), edited by Janos S. Petofi and Dorothea Franck. (Text is in German.) (DS)