The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between working memory and text coherence in Chinese text comprehension. Eighty-six participants completed an operation-character working memory span task to be classified into low-span and high-span readers and a reading task to measure the time to detect inconsistency as well as the…

In the current debate about the abstractness of children's early grammatical knowledge, Tomasello & Abbott-Smith (2002) have suggested that children might first develop "weak" or "partial" representations of abstract syntactic structures. This paper attempts to characterize these structures by comparing the development of constructions around…

There is a continuing need to investigate how contemporary students in schools are writing the word, and their world, beyond modernist parameters of the page. This article explores the online writing of a senior English world literature class, located in a Western Canadian city, as examined through a recent qualitative case study. Borrowing a 17th…

Although current theories concerning the composing process overlap in useful and interesting ways, a paradigm is emerging. This article discusses two of the major assumptions of this emerging paradigm: that there are distinct purposes for each kind of discourse (for example, expressive, literary, persuasive, and referential) and that the relation…

This paper is directed toward a traditional problem in the analysis of texts, that of finding meaningful linguistic units that are larger than a sentence and smaller than the text itself. Two principles are given for finding extended temporal structures based on the temporal expressions that occur in sentences: a sentence can be captured to form…

Investigates the relevance of a Gricean model for accounting for coherent discourse in courts of law. Identifies 19 rules of discourse congruent with Grice's Cooperative Principle in transcripts of eight trials. However, finds courts must coerce participants to be cooperative. Concludes that Grice's theory does not account adequately for coherent…

The study compared the productions of 35 articulation impaired children (ages 3 to 10) obtained by picture elicited single word and connected speech sampling methods. Productions were compared on the basis of both the number and type of errors made under the two testing conditions. (Author/PHR)

This study examined the effects of structured conversational turn-taking on disfluencies and speech rate of a boy (age 5) who stuttered, based on dinner-time conversations in the subject's home. Results indicated that disfluencies decreased when structured conversational turn-taking was instituted and increased when turn-taking conditions were not…

Short-term stability of cohesion scores for spoken narratives of 39 language-impaired and 39 normally developing elementary-aged children was investigated. Mean cohesive adequacy scores were stable across narratives, but stability coefficients were only moderately large. Results also indicated that stability increases as children gained experience…

The emergence of the ability to maintain and develop a topic of conversation is examined. The production of a competently structured topic involves utterances that are both propositionally contingent on previous utterances and related to the global concern of the topic. Children under 2 years of age can only product utterances that are…

Composing is controlled by information feedback from prior behavior which serves to influence future behavior. This model posits movement toward a desired end product through a continual interchange of writing and examining and evaluating what has been written against internal standards. A study was conducted to determine the extent to which…

Narratives about personal experiences were elicited from 33 kindergarten children in a suburb of Zurich. The narratives were analyzed for the development of the use of the particle "ebe" from a conversational context (where the use of the particle was already mastered) to an appropriate narrative context (in which the particle, as…

Describes two experiments testing the hypothesis that thematic titles largely relieve the reader of the task of constructing a sense from coherent texts. Finds that such titles significantly increase free recall of structured or slightly disorganized texts, while only prolonged reading allows titles to raise recall of an unstructured text. (MES)

Studied 60 adults to determine age differences in cohesion of narrative retellings in reference and conjunction discourse systems. Older adults scored significantly lower on the memory span measure, recalled less story information, and made more referential errors in retellings than younger adults. (RJC)