The 24 entries in this annotated bibliography are designed to introduce teachers and researchers to the major studies in the field of neurology as it relates to the composing process. Entries in the first section are of works that explain the complex processes and physiology of the brain, while those in the second section are of works attempting…

Children who learn a dialect differ in pronunciation, syntax, or both from children who learn standard English. It has been assumed that dialectal differences contribute to difficulties in learning to read. Another question is whether a disadvantaged child who speaks a dialect is exposed to a language environment rich enough for him to make normal…

To measure the effectiveness of an intervention program of language development, it is necessary to understand childrens' knowledge and use of grammatical structures. In both standard and dialectal English, grammar rules are learned without formal instruction for forming the negative, interrogative, and other parts of speech. A mental…

Two experiments were designed to assess children's ability to understand recursive structures of thinking which include thinking about contiguous people, thinking about action between people, thinking about thinking, and thinking about thinking about thinking. In Experiment I, 32 second, fourth, sixth, and eighth graders were tested on eight tasks…

Following reading and listening tasks, adult long-term memory is high in semantic information and low in syntactic and lexical information. Comprehension during reading and listening must depend to some extent, however, on short term retention of linguistic information that is less abstract and shares more features of the input than the semantic…

Research in bilingualism has shown that the balance between a bilingual's two languages is rarely even and that there is something special about the mother tongue. Theories concerning separate storage of the two languages and first language primacy predict that: (1) the meanings of translation-equivalent words are not identical, and (2) the…

This article re-examines the role of the pronounceability of visually presented materials, following the idea that intergration on the vocal-auditory level may result from letter combinations that are easy to pronounce. (CLK)

The properties of four different tests of the treatment effect in experiments using linguistic materials are examined. (Author/RM)

A study is reported describing an output-monitoring phenomenon in free recall and establishing that subjects have accurate knowledge concerning their previous output performance. Implications with respect to other known memory phenomena are discussed. (Author/RM)

A study is described which examined the retrieval of regular and irregular past tense verbs. Results suggested that preterites such as "taught" are not stored as separate and independent lexical units but are formed from the verb stem by means of derivational rules. (Author/RM)

Two experiments examined the comprehension of singly and multiply negated sentences. Difficulty of comprehension was measured by the speed and accuracy with which subjects judged the semantic reasonableness of sentences. Marked and negatively prefixed adjectives were a particular focus of the study. (Author/RM)

An experiment is reported which shows that with identical preceding context, the same initial phoneme targets contained in high transitional probability words were responded to significantly faster than those in low transitional probability words. The result argues for the importance of transitional probability as an independent variable in…

Reports on two experiments which question the assumption that semantic processing is superior to nonsemantic processing, and which demonstrate that effective semantic elaboration cannot be equated with the quantity of semantically congrous information. (Author/AM)

Four stories were divided into function word units; a dozen variables were all found to be statistically significant predictors of recall. For the more structured stories, subjects' intuitions, gist, and redundancy were the best predictors; for the less structured stories, serial position and repetition were best. (EJS)