A study was conducted to test the utility of a protocol, consisting of 30 pragmatic parameters of language, to evaluate conversational speech from 157 subjects in six diagnostic groups. Four distinct profiles emerged separating the diagnostic groups within which differences in the distribution of pragmatic deficits were identified. (Author/KM)

The influence of visual and auditory factors and intonational emphasis on sentence comprehension skills of young normal and mentally handicapped children was studied, using the Sentence Comprehension Test. (Sample items are appended). (Author/MH)

A year-long project to develop an automatic English grammar text-analysis for Chinese students in Taiwan to help writing revision processes is described. The project analyzed 135 writing samples, developed an electronic dictionary, and researched error analysis, linguistic analysis, and natural language processing in computational linguistics.…

Reports on a study in which (n=40) fifth graders solved and retold one-step compare word problems. Students performed better, had shorter response times, and retold problems correctly more frequently on consistent-language problems than on inconsistent-language problems. (Contains 36 references.) (MKR)

This study investigated whether top-down or bottom-up cognitive processing was more important in listening comprehension in large-scale English-as-a-Second-Language tests administered to secondary school students in Hong Kong over a period of seven years. Results suggest that bottom-up processing was more important than top-down processing in…

Investigates factors influencing language-switching behavior in the thinking processes of a bilingual person engaged in second-language writing, based on review of literature and a case study in which an individual performs three tasks using think-aloud protocols: text composition in English (second language); written translation from Chinese…

Speakers monitor their own speech and, when they discover problems, make repairs. In the proposal examined here, speakers also monitor addressees for understanding and, when necessary, alter their utterances in progress. Addressees cooperate by displaying and signaling their understanding in progress. Pairs of participants were videotaped as a…

A study investigated lexical decision-making among Dutch-English bilinguals in the auditory modality. Subjects, bilinguals at three proficiency levels (intermediate, high, and near-native) were presented with 40 cognate and 40 non-cognate word pairs, a similar number of English and Dutch distractors, and a similar number of nonsense words in each…

A study investigated the encoding and decoding effects in English as a Second Language (ESL) and native English speaking (L1) students in Vancouver, British Columbia (Canada), by isolating the difficulties due to encoding and decoding in these students. The study examined specifically whether there are significant decoding effects based on…

A substantial amount of literature in education and psychology supports the notion that reading combined with writing enhances comprehension and recall. To investigate how various writing tasks affect thinking, a pilot study was conducted, which produced results consistent with the hypothesis that text engagement (student interaction with written…

A study compared the effects of two instructional strategies on ninth grade students' reading comprehension, retention, and attitude. Students in 15 ninth-grade classes were randomly assigned to one of three treatments: summary writing (SW), writing short answers to questions (QA), and rereading (RR), (control). The dependent measures were good…

This study builds on research that identified empirical evidence indicating that at least one language for special purposes (LSP) domain and one non-LSP domain are in fact associated with some differential results in the consequent interlanguage (IL) structure of non-native users of English. The current study focuses on the methodological problems…

The focus of the study reported here was to investigate people's comprehension ability as a function of the number and type of negations embedded within sentences similar to those which might appear as premises in syllogisms. The subjects were one group of 11 Hispanic and four groups of Anglo students, with 15 in each Anglo group. Thirty-two…

The reading recall protocols of 24 tenth grade and 24 twelfth grade students were used in a study that investigated the relationship of average reading ability and high school grade placement to recall of expository text with adversative and attributive structures. Two test passages were written in an adversative structure with contrasting…

An ethnographic study of kindergarten through grade two classrooms was conducted of various sociolinguistic contexts in which young students were developing oral and written language competencies. Nonparticipant observations were conducted in both regular classrooms and Chapter I small group classroom settings. The observations were analyzed from…