What errors in English subject-to-verb agreement reveal about the syntactic nature of sentence subjects was investigated. Participants in 3 experiments included 104 undergraduates and 64 members of a university community. Results suggest the abstract syntactic relation of subject controls/mediates verb agreement, not notional properties and…

This article reflects one session of a course in thinking and communicating for Pace University (New York) faculty. The purpose of the course was to heighten awareness that language can seriously misrepresent events which it describes, thus affecting students' ability to perceive, evaluate, and make day-to-day decisions. Beginning with a concrete…

A number of studies on the order of adjectives in the English noun phrase are reviewed. Analysis of the studies and examples used in them indicates that almost any order of adjective seems to be possible depending on the intended meaning of the speaker or the situation in which the speaker frames an utterance. To see if in fact the ordering of…

The ability of English as a second language (ESL) readers to comprehend different types of nominal compounds in English technical literature was investigated. College students were asked to recover the meaning of 73 nominal compounds in two technical English language articles on occupational health and safety. The intermediate and advanced ESL…

English nominalizations turn verbs and adjectives into nouns systematically, but their meanings can change unpredictably. In the United States, college composition handbooks urge students to avoid using nominalizations, but elsewhere secondary students learn to write them responsibly and to recognize being manipulated when reading them.…

Recently, confirmatory factor analysis has been extended to the case of dichotomous data (e.g., Muthen, 1978). In this study, confirmatory factor analysis was applied to all-or-none recall data from a designed experiment. In the experiment, subjects read pairs of English nouns and then tried to recall the right hand member of the pair when…

The Semantic Relation Test (SRT) was administered to 83 undergraduate students at Hamilton College (New York) to test the extent of subjects' knowledge of different relationships between word pairs. The 60 analogy items covered five categories of relationships: antonyms, case relations, class inclusion, part-whole relations, and similars. Three…

This paper discusses various techniques that scientists and other professionals can use to keep current in their field despite the large amount of available information, such as consulting abstracts, indexes, reviews, and catalogues. It also examines specific language patterns that are used in the sciences to produce synthesis and abridgement,…

The effectiveness of three teaching techniques used by native speakers with students of English as a second language was studied. The three techniques were presenting a word in isolation, in combination with a picture, and in a sentence. The study included a 24-hour interval between teaching and testing to determine which method was more effective…

Many linguists have maintained that the pronouns "he,""his," and "him" and the noun "man," when used in the generic sense, legitimately refer to both males and females and effectively cue readers to think of both. Others have argued, however, that the generic terms cause readers to "filter out" or…

This study attempts to identify what mechanisms might be used to reduce gender bias in two highly inflected languages, Greek and Arabic. Twenty native speakers of Greek and Arabic attending Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., were surveyed for the experiment. The students were: (1) asked to read a standard job announcement in their native…