The ideas of Vygotsky [Vygotsky, L. S. (1987). "Thinking and speech." In "The collected works of L. S. Vygotsky," (Vol. 1). New York: Plenum. (Original work published 1934.)] have been increasingly influential in accounting for social-environmental influences on the development of social understanding (SU). In the first part of this article, I…

In this essay, Andrew Stables and Stephen Gough explore some of the implications for educational policy and practice of a view of living (and, therefore, of learning) as semiotic engagement. Such a view, Stables and Gough argue, has the potential to displace or circumvent essentially Cartesian models currently dominant within learning theory…

To investigate the stability of trace reactivation in healthy older adults, 22 older volunteers with no significant neurological history participated in a cross-modal priming task. Whilst both object relative center embedded (ORC) and object relative right branching (ORR) sentences were employed, working memory load was reduced by limiting the…

With business documents, visuals can serve to enhance the written word in conveying the message. Images can be especially effective when used subtly, on part of the page, on successive pages to provide continuity, or even set as watermarks over the entire page. A main reason given for traditional text-only business documents is that they are…

Learning to write well often proves to be one of the most difficult areas in the English language arts for young children. However, in these fourth- and fifth-grade language arts classrooms, children are offered opportunities to explore, think through, and express meaning across and within sign systems--in particular, using art, drama, and…

The main focus of this paper is on the study of students' conceptual understanding of two major concepts of Set Theory--the concepts of inclusion and belonging. To do so, we analyze two experimental classroom episodes. Our analysis rests on the theoretical idea that, from an ontogenetic viewpoint, the cognitive activity of representation of…

This paper is an exploration of the philosophical and semiotic implications of educational acts of meaning-making that are mediated through narrative inquiry. The paper discusses the risks of a narrative view of teacher education as it is related to the "I"--philosophy tradition of Subjective Idealism. Indeed, modelling the Self may be…

This article discusses the definition, classification, etymology and history, formation and the use of acronyms, and provides a list of the most common acronyms currently in use. (Text is in French.) (CLK)

Three types of jokes are distinguishable according to the style of speech used: 1) the merely prosaic joke, 2) the joke with a fictitious dialogue, and 3) the dialogue joke. These are analyzed in terms of communication, discourse analysis, and semantics. (Text is in German.) (DS)

Focuses on behavior of Russian stems with regard to vowel/zero alternations. Explanations are in terms of surface manifestations, and reservations about generative grammar are expressed. (RM)

A method for analyzing connected discourse beyond paragraph length is demonstrated. (JH)

New problems in translation, as between natural and artificial languages, may be explained and solved by the application of semiotics to translation. One rule emerging is that semiotic transformations are replacements of signs encoding a message by signs of another code while preserving invariant information. (CK)

Discusses the need for iconological studies, involving semiology and sociocultural research, in the use of visual aids in language instruction. (Text is in French.) (AM)

Gestalt theory deals with the act of thinking and the construction of concepts in a situated manner, and, therefore, could be used to study how meaning is extracted from a visual display. Using the Gestalt framework of form cues and their usage patterns in the perception of, and learning from, visual media, researchers could study frame, line…