This study used direct observation procedures to analyze communicative intent and subsequent frequency of turntaking between four adults with developmental disabilities and their residential staff. Results suggest that in group discourse, questioning-type speech may set the occasion for a greater number of subsequent conversational turns than does…

Two experiments investigated the focusing properties of thematic roles, and a third examined the view that thematic role preferences reflect a focusing on the consequences of the represented event. Results focus on the structure of represented events, top-down and bottom-up processes, thematic hierarchies and pronoun comprehension. (35 references)…

Examines Nickels's claim that interactive models of lexical access in speech production cannot account for naming data from a group of anomic patients. This paper reiterates that the behavior of connectionist models is not easily predictable without running the appropriate simulations, and discusses the role of frequency in lexical access in…

Examination of syntactic complexity in the movie retellings of 77 elementary school-age Spanish-speaking children revealed developmental differences in the length of T-units, index of subordination, use of relative clauses, and prepositional phrases. Analysis underscores the significance of subordination as a cohesive device and as an indicator of…

A study investigating the effects of "text linguists'" revisions on the comprehensibility of expository prose had as subjects 92 high school juniors who read original and revised versions of two passages from a high school history textbook. The revisions included changes regarding the given-new contract, schemata, reference, lexical…

In a study of the effects of time restrictions and passage access on reading comprehension, 128 college freshmen enrolled in two different developmental reading courses were divided into 4 groups of 32 subjects each. (Tests used to assess reading ability at the college level are usually either power tests with liberal time limits, or speed tests,…

This report presents the text analysis of "Babar Loses His Crown," a story for beginning readers. (The techniques used in arriving at the analysis are presented in a Reading Center Technical Report, Number 168, "Problems and Techniques of Text Analysis.") Tables are given for a statistical lexical analysis and for a syntactic…

The Thai Discourse Analysis Project seeks to provide a description of linguistic structures of importance in understanding the nature of Thai speech. Previous studies have been limited, and restricted to consideration of the written language and "literary" speech. The project consists of three phases: the acquisition of recorded texts,…

Adults with mild and moderate levels of retardation (20 living in institutions and 20 in the community) answered simulated job interview questions. The community group produced a greater number of appropriate answers to both simple and complex questions than did the institutional group. (Author/JDD)

Arguing that discourse coherence can provide a window on the writing processes that produce it, this paper describes developmental differences observed in children's writing and proposes a procedural model to account for those differences. The first section of the paper points out that a developmental model of the writing process should specify…

The unique position of WH words in Slavic languages is discussed, with specific reference to Bulgarian and Serbo-Croatian. The multiple fronting characteristics of Bulgarian and Serbo-Croatian differ in terms of the following positions and behaviors: extraction from embedded questions; clitic placement and other indications of constituent status;…

Eighty-two undergraduate and graduate students at a major southwestern university participated in a study integrating reading research utilizing tachistoscopes with current knowledge based on analysis of reading connected texts. A tachistoscope was used to examine the nature of visual perception in relation to the ability of the subjects to apply…

Three experiments were conducted to test the hypothesis that a paragraph composed of sentences with identical or closely related topics would be easier to read than one whose sentence topics were only remotely related. The first experiment involved subjective judgments by 131 high school students on the readability of two paragraphs identical in…

A study explored context effects on two selected indexes of communicative competence in the narrative language of a sample of first grade children. The 30 subjects each completed 2 tasks--the retelling of a story that had been read to them and the dictation of an original story. These narratives were recorded and analyzed for linguistic competence…

This multiple case study investigated the relationship between kindergarten teachers' questions and children's responses. The classroom discussions of 4 groups of children and their teachers (all middle income level) were taped and classified into five different question and response categories. Results indicated that: (1) some teachers ask more…