An auditory technique for studying semantic priming and lexical access, single-word shadowing, was applied in three separate experiments: priming in word pairs; priming in sentence context; and comparison of priming in children aged 7-11 and elderly adults. Results indicate that, because shadowing works across ages and does not require reading, it…

Discusses techniques for helping English-as-a-Foreign-Language students activate their prior knowledge for effective top-down processing to facilitate reading comprehension. Three activities are discussed: the use of a semantic map, questioning, and previewing. (Author/VWL)

Canadian English-Italian bilingual children were administered phonological, reading, spelling, syntactic, and working memory tasks in both languages. Results suggest English-Italian interdependence is most clearly related to phonological processing but may influence other linguistic modules. Exposure to a language with more predictable…

Investigates children's changing sensitivity to processing cues for identifying agent as a function of proficiency in a second language. English speaking children in an immersion school were asked to identify the agent for a set of audiotaped sentences in English and Japanese. Found children learned word order, lexical semantics, and canonical…

Reports on a strategy training study that investigated the lexical processing strategies used by second language learners when they encounter unfamiliar vocabulary while reading. Results indicate some lexical processing strategies lead to higher retention rates than others.(Author/VWL)

Calls for greater attention to the perceptual processes involved in second language listening, and particularly to the part they play in breakdowns of understanding. Suggests employing basic auditory phonetics as a means of classifying, diagnosing, and predicting problems of lexical segmentation. (Author/VWL)

Five studies examined preschoolers' understanding of linguistic form class and pragmatic context in presence of a single exemplar or multiexemplars. Data indicated that by 2 years, children use linguistic form class, and by age 3, use pragmatic context. Young children have begun to understand the distinction between generic and nongeneric noun…

Examines and tests the hypothesis that left-branching (LB) sentences are judged to be more formal than right-branching (RB), and that center-branching (CB) sentences would behave like LB. Two studies involving university students are described in which LB, RB, and CB sentence structure formality were judged. (17 references) (GLR)

A discussion of language curriculum design for promoting learner autonomy looks at the objectives of such a curriculum, the learning implied by those objectives, and the function and relevance of the learnings. (Author/MSE)

Examines the consonant substitution, sequencing, omission, and addition errors of severely reading disabled teenagers in recognizing consonants in orthographically regular nonwords, and compares the results with responses to identical stimuli by normal children of the same age and reading level groups. (Author/DJD)

Examines certain instructional effects on second-language acquisition, such as code-focused instruction and classroom interaction. Empirical research on instructional effects are outlined in relation to some basic issues, including learning environment influences and processing constraints. (54 references) (GLR)

A review of studies investigating the effects of bilingualism on the cognitive and academic performance of language-minority students indicates both negative and positive effects. Compared with monolingual students, differences favoring bilingual students are found in studies utilizing Piagetian measures, which are not heavily language dependent.…

This article reports studies of adolescent passive and active vocabulary development. It describes measuring instruments applied to the oral and written language of 12- and 15-year-old students drawn from 10 social backgrounds in England and Australia. Implications for education are drawn from the results of these studies. (IAH)

Examines the performance of normal and disabled readers in recognizing whether orally presented letter strings represent real words. Finds that disabled readers have difficulty in making available the full range of semantic cues when processing stimuli in an acoustic form, supporting a verbal-processing deficit hypothesis of reading disability.…

Attempts to clarify the notion of language competence and draws on its relevance to language teaching practices. Language use competence may involve the adjustment of pre-assembled and memorized patterns and not so much the generation of expressions by direct reference to rules. (Author/CB)