Professional training for translators, most often begun in specialized subject areas, should begin with a course in translation theory. The first purpose of such a course is to teach students to think as translators, whose function is to convey the message contained in the source language. Simply stated, this is a three-step process of: (1)…

Students arriving in the language department at Heriot-Watt University (Scotland) who study two languages arrive deficient in both languages and often in English as well. Generally, students have little knowledge of current and international affairs or the history and culture of the countries whose languages they are learning. However, they…

Automatic processing of word meaning by bilingual children was studied in a picture/word interference task. Thirty elementary and junior high students, fluent in French and English, named pictures as rapidly as possible while attempting to ignore distractor words printed inside the pictures' borders. The printed distractors interfered with naming…

Designed to determine a reader's ability in processing information relationships in written discourse in English, the extended-cloze instrument consists of six reading passages, each with four complete sentences deleted. Students read each passage and select the best of four multiple choice alternative sentences for each deletion. The instrument…

Productive errors in the Spanish of 3 Spanish-speaking children and 115 adults learning Spanish as a second language are analyzed. The errors are organized into three categories--lexical, morphological, and syntactic--and each category is further divided according to the type of cognitive error-processing strategy shown: simplification, reduction…

A comparison of measures of the attained writing proficiency of 45 college-level students of English as a second language is reported. Students were tested by two indirect measures, the Test of the Ability to Subordinate (TAS) and the Revision and Editing Test (RET), and their compositions were evaluated by a direct measure, holistic evaluation.…

Deals with the problem of transcoding, that is, when in switching from one sign system to another relations must be created between corresponding structures in the different systems. The mechanisms of transcoding are examined for spoken and written speech, numeral words and figures, and tone symbols and musical notes. (SCC)

A data-based study done in Philadelphia examined the constraints on relative pronoun deletion and looked for a possible correlation to social stratification or stylistic variation. Restrictive relative clauses only are examined. Constraints appear to be due to performance factors related to sentence processing. (SCC)

The evolution of "language utilities," a concept confined largely to the francophone world and relating to the uses of language in computer science and the use of computer science for languages, is chronicled. The language utilities are of three types: (1) tools for language development, primarily dictionary databases and related tools;…

This collection of articles is one of a series of semiannual reports on the status of speech research at Haskins' Laboratories. The titles of the 18 articles and their authors are as follows: "The Alphabetic Principle and Learning to Read" (Isabelle Y. Liberman and others); "Language Development from an Evolutionary…

A discussion of pre-historic (i.e., preliterate) language looks at the processes of affixation and inflection in the context of two conflicting theories on the complexity of those languages. The traditional view holds that the grammar used by early Indo-Europeans was at least as complex and abstract as that of any modern educated and literate…

A discussion of the English language teaching method of Toru Matsumoto, author of "Thinking in English," reconstructs the instructional principle and presents it for further development. First, the history of English language teaching in Japan is reviewed and Matsumoto's biography is sketched. The salient features of the principle are…

One of a series of semiannual reports, this publication contains 14 articles which report the status and progress of studies on the nature of speech, instrumentation for its investigation, and practical applications. The titles of the articles and their authors are as follows: "Gestural Structure and Phonological Patterns" (Catherine P.…

Work with patients with attentional deficits produced by posterior cerebral lesions has shown that such patients can identify words correctly even when they fail to report letters in nonwords contralateral to the lesion. Because of this, it has been assumed in cognitive neuropsychology that lesions do not produce new phenomena but instead provide…

It is a good thing for the field of applied linguistics to adopt experimental methods of research where appropriate and to think more in terms of testable models of second language processing. However, there is a threat of psycholinguistics becoming the parent discipline, most likely temporary, of applied linguistics. This would be unwise for two…