Cohesion analysis has been used to investigate the language of schizophrenics and that associated with other psychiatric syndromes. Cohesion, one means of creating text, cannot account for all aspects of the pretheoretical notion of coherence. As a research tool, cohesion meets the dual criteria of an analysis of language in context and…

Addresses native monolingual U.S. and Chinese incipiently bilingual children's ability to detect and identify inter- and intraword boundaries. Young children demonstrate similar patterns in their segmentation behavior and there is a developmental progression in this behavior. Mandarin Chinese subjects learning to read Chinese and English…

Normally hearing children (aged 4--10) and hearing-impaired children (aged 6--14) were tested on word awareness skills, such as the distinction between words and their referents, and their ability to provide explicit definitions of word. Older children performed significantly better than younger children, and normally hearing children performed…

Experiments compared two closed head injury (CHI) subjects with normal subject's ability to interpret indirect speech acts with the ability of uninjured individuals. The CHI individuals displayed difficulty in interpreting indirect speech or rejecting literal meanings. The results are discussed in terms of common cognitive deficits after closed…

Describes research into the correspondence between speech and sign language by looking at simultaneous communication as it is used by fluent deaf persons. The study aims to determine what relationship, if any, exists between the morpheme level and the message level of utterances in discourse. (SED)

Compares and contrasts the abilities of normal and learning disabled students to abstract spelling patterns in the course of their acquisition of spelling skills. The performance of the learning disabled was significantly below that of the normal students. In addition, error analysis indicates that the responses of the learning disabled spellers…

Results of a study of learning disabled children's conversational competence indicate that they may not be providing their conversational partners with feedback that others need to adapt their communicative style to these children's comprehension levels. The difficulty in identifying social contexts where different conversational rules apply may…

Describes two research programs on the syntactic abilities of hearing impaired and normal hearing individuals. The first program involved deaf students acquiring English structure; the second involved the construction of the Test of Syntactic Abilities and its application to deaf, hard of hearing, and normal hearing students in the United States,…

In a study attention in second-language learning, four groups of beginning learners of Spanish (n=83 total) completed one of four crossword puzzles designed to isolate the effects of alertness, orientation, and detection. Results lend strong empirical support to one theory of attention, while indicating short-term effects of detection. (Author/MSE)

This study evaluated the effects of practice with a referential communication task on the form and effectiveness of elderspeak, a speech register targeted at older listeners. The task required the listener to reproduce a route drawn on a map following the speakers' instructions. (Author/JL)

Results of research of children's evaluative reactions to bilingual code switching indicate that children by at least 11 years of age are aware of situational, interpersonal, and intergroup factors in dyadic interactions involving interlocutors from distinct ethnolinguistic groups. Suggests that manipulations of the research technique could be…

Examines the communicative functions served by the lexical usage of normal and language impaired children whose speech was limited to single word utterances. (EKN)

An auditory technique for studying semantic priming and lexical access, single-word shadowing, was applied in three separate experiments: priming in word pairs; priming in sentence context; and comparison of priming in children aged 7-11 and elderly adults. Results indicate that, because shadowing works across ages and does not require reading, it…

A study compared results of referential communication and perspective-taking tasks for 10 high-functioning autistic adolescents and young adults and matched normally developing controls. Autistic subjects showed significant communicative dysfunction and qualitatively different communicative interactions. Possible explanations: deficits in "theory…

Canadian English-Italian bilingual children were administered phonological, reading, spelling, syntactic, and working memory tasks in both languages. Results suggest English-Italian interdependence is most clearly related to phonological processing but may influence other linguistic modules. Exposure to a language with more predictable…