It was hypothesized that writers of sentence pairs with clear relationships would have better recall of second sentences than would writers of sentence pairs with unclear relationships. Clear connections between sentences in sentence pairs were defined as those sentences in which the language of the first sentence was explicitly picked up in the…

A study was conducted (1) to develop a more comprehensive theoretical framework for exploring the nature and process of response to literature, (2) to develop an integrated schema for analyzing responses, and (3) to apply this theory and schema to the responses of fifth and eighth grade students to two different kinds of texts. Subjects were ten…

Neo-Romantic aspects of Hitler's National Socialism Movement in Germany and the New Left movement in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s are detailed in this paper. Following a discussion of fundamental concepts, the paper analyzes the Romantic bases of the two movements, including their use of nonverbal symbols; their views on morality,…

In order to determine the effects of writing for different audiences and in different modes of discourse on the syntactic complexity of compositions written by sixth and tenth grade students, 240 students were asked to write in three different modes (argumentive, descriptive, and narrative) to be read by a teacher and a best friend. There was a…

Comprehension is a process that occurs within the reader and is at least partially dependent on cohesion and coherence. The concept of cohesion is used to show how sentences which are structurally independent of one another may be linked together. Cohesion exists within a text and is not the same as coherence, which is something the reader…

The research investigated the nature and frequency of hesitation phenomena in speech as presented within content segments featuring interaction among family members on three modes of television programming: documentary, prime time, and soap opera. A sample of videotape recordings for each program format was content-analyzed by noting repetitions,…

This analysis seeks to link discourse structure and semantic or lexical systems. The example is given of a Cuna curing chant named "the way of the pepper," in which 53 names for pepper ("kapur") are used in a projection of a paradigmatic axis (the lexical taxonomy) onto a syntagmatic axis. A corollary of the principle of…

In speaking a child sometimes makes constructions in which a sequence of separate utterances expresses a semantic relation not expressed by either utterance. These "vertical constructions" are the main point of this study. Previous studies of construction in child language have largely dealt with sentences. In this study, sentences are…

This report is the third in a series of annual reports describing the research performed by Stanford Research Institute to provide the technology that will allow speech understanding systems to be designed and implemented for a variety of different task domains and environmental constraints. The current work is being carried out cooperatively with…

With comprehension defined as the ability to specify the relationship between two items, an investigation was conducted to determine the ability of children to relate ideas from several sentences to arrive at answers to questions. This study was a replication of a previous study in which inner-city children participated. In constrast, the subjects…

In this study, the judgmental ratings that 15 teacher-subjects made of the two-factors of "confidence-eagerness" and "ethnicity-nonstandardness" in children's speech are compared to their presumptions of the speech behavior expected from children from certain ethnic and social status groups. In a pre- and post-test experiment…

This volume contains the papers read at the Conference on Language and Language Behavior held at the University of Michigan's Center for Research on Language and Language Behavior in October 1966. Papers are ordered under the following topics: First Language Acquisition in Natural Setting, Controlled Acquisition of First Language Skills, Second…

To determine the variety of syntactic patterns that potential English teachers would normally use and the possible differences in their oral and written discourse, 1000-word oral and written language samples were collected from 21 student teachers. These samples were divided into T-units and classified according to 23 sentence patterns based on…

Based on the belief that the most appropriate focus of a language arts curriculum is the process and content of communication, these several unipacs (instructional packets) explore some essential elements of communication which should be incorporated into a curricular theory: (1) abstraction , which is the assertion that words may be classified as…

An adequate description of the total reading process would have to deal with reading in at least three dimensions comprising three different sets of relationships. A model of the process might well take the form of three concentric spheres: an outer, sociolinguistic shell in which text and reader respectively could be related to a particular…