To offer a historical perspective on vocabulary studies, this paper presents summaries, reviews, and critiques of vocabulary studies in chronological order of publication. The only variance from this format are published rebuttals and/or critiques, which are presented immediately following the original studies. The paper is divided into two parts.…

The results of an examination of computer data formatting and data analysis strategies from two diverse second language projects and their implications for establishing standards are outlined in the form of suggested formatting conventions and analysis procedures. The formatting suggestions address the issues of distinguishing line types,…

This paper draws upon a theory of stories that relates particular text structures to particular affective states and then relates the affective states to story intuitions and overall judgments of liking. The first section of the paper outlines the theory as it deals with some important properties of the genre of popular stories in Western…

Part of a larger investigation of the rhetorical character of the presidencies of Harry Truman through Jimmy Carter, this report concentrates on the presidents' linguistic styles and their semantic choices. The first half of the report discusses the background of the study and the development of a computerized language analysis…

Anaphora, a linguistic structure that refers to previously mentioned or implied text, has been implicated as a possible cause of reading comprehension difficulty among children. Reading research has focused on the surface structures of anaphora (pronouns and noun demonstratives, for example) and has viewed comprehension of anaphora as a language…

A study was conducted to determine whether children in revising their writing to accommodate new information would make corresponding textual changes to preserve appropriate focus and cohesion. The subjects, 48 children each from grades three, six, and nine, were presented with a task that involved descriptions of pictures with incongruent…

Attempts to distinguish the role of the structure of a message in determining the different modalities of decodification and memorization in oral discourse based on the theories and experiments of Ragnar Rommetveit of the Oslo School. (CFM)

Discusses similarities and differences between vocal music and spoken language. Uses for vocal music to aid in the phonological instruction of Russian are suggested. (LMO)

Outlines a series of humorous classroom activities and games using novel combinations of words and word parts for vocabulary development. (MSE)

Describes four experiments on the speech segmentation procedures of English listeners listening to English words and compares them to earlier work based on French speakers listening to French words. The results indicate that the segmentation process characteristically employed by French speakers and English speakers differs. (SED)

Reviews research on story grammar to show how crucial it is for readers of all ages to know how stories are structured. Examines implications for teaching and for choosing instructional materials. (FL)

A French short story is used to illustrate several possible levels of study for a single literary text: linguistic analysis, textual analysis, and analysis of uses of the romantic form. The approach suggested integrates these levels so that each is enriched by the perspectives offered by the others. (MSE)

This paper examines the different ways of forming negative sentences in the Chaamling language, an indigenous language spoken in the eastern, hilly districts of Nepal. It explains that negation, or negativization, in the Chaamling language is done with the help of affixation. In imperative sentences, the prefix mi- is added to the verb, which is…

A salient characteristic of the morpho-lexical systems of the Salish languages is the widespread use of reduplication in both derivational and inflectional functions. Salish reduplication signals such typologically common categories as "distributive/plural,""repetitive/continuative," and "diminutive," the cross-linguistically marked but typically…

First-, second-, and third-grade readers were asked to pick items that differed in terms of a rule-governed description of orthographic structure. Task performance improved with school experience. Reading ability was positively correlated with knowledge of orthographic structure for young readers. (Author/PN)