Word processors have been shown to favor a local perspective over a global perspective on the text during writing. Recently, advanced outline processors or "idea processors" have appeared that allow the writer to represent and handle structural aspects of a text so that the writer may compose the text within an outline and experiment with…

In the hope of filling in a missing link for experimental psychologists' research on reading, this paper provides a general review of research on the issue of orthography and its relation to reading. The traditional classification of logographic, syllabic, and alphabetic modes are examined to see how much orthographic variations affect the…

This paper develops the thesis that the knowledge a person possesses has a potent influence on what he or she will learn and remember from exposure to discourse. After outlining some assumptions about the characteristics of the structures (schemata) in which existing knowledge is packaged, a theory of the processes involved in assimilating the…

This book is concerned with tracing the history and logic of the psycholinguistic orientation toward reading, and is directed at reading teachers and teachers of language skills and communication processes in general. Its underlying theme is that reading is essentially a communicative process that can be fairly autonomously acquired when text…

A probe recall short-term retention task was used to test the applicability of the "phonological recoding" (Conrad, 1972) and "flexible decoding" (Smith, 1972) models to processing tactics used by readers of Chinese. Subjects were 45 adult speakers of Cantonese. Stimuli were lists of Chinese characters which varied in terms of phonological and…

This book concludes a six-volume review of research and theory on learning and cognition. Its six chapters cover the following topics: theories of semantic memory, comprehension and memory of text, coding processes in memory, perceptual learning from reading, speech perception, and the organization and core concepts of learning theory and…

Sixteen children (aged 14 to 26 months), who were reported by their parents to overextend, were tested for overextension in both language production and comprehension. The children were first asked to name each of a series of pictures of inappropriate exemplars of the words they were reported to overextend. Those words that were overextended, a…

Applied linguistic theory is examined in light of neuroscientific knowledge, especially in regard to the structure and function of the cerebral cortex, in order to illuminate the process and methods of teaching or learning language. Wernicke's Area and Broca's Area are parts of the brain that have been associated with language function.…

This paper presents a means of evaluating answers to comprehension questions by analyzing the oral language used in the answers to the questions according to the average number of words per communication unit, a measure of linguistic and cognitive growth, in order to determine the effectiveness of comprehension questions asked at two cognitive…

In the first part of the paper the idea of the cognitive network is developed. The network consists of concepts linked together by relationships which are themselves concepts. Concepts are learned according to simple rules, and the network grows as new concepts are learned. Part II considers the growth and structure of language. The growth of…

Thematization, the relative frequency of a discourse referent, and topicalization are conceptualized as related discourse functions. In a probe recall experiment, a word with a thematized referent was a better recall probe than a word with a nonthematized referent. Also, an agent noun was a better prompt than a recipient, and this semantic…

This document, one of a series on questions regarding humanistic education, contains a transcribed conversation about language between Walter J. Ong, Professor of English and Professor of Humanities in Psychiatry at Saint Louis University, and Wayne Altree of Newton South High School, Newton Center, Massachusetts. This conversation on language…

The readings compiled for this collection require that the reader have an acquaintance with the basic ideas in the field of educational psychology and a desire to read further and make direct contact with some original sources. The main selection criterion of the papers that are included was their coverage of classroom learning with particular…

A definition of bilingualism can include speakers of different languages as well as those who speak several dialects or several sub-varieties of dialects in the same language. Most speakers are able to practice code-switching, whether it is from language to language or dialect to dialect, and the processes involved in such a capability may be the…

This paper explores the questions of how and why children learn names for things. The acquisition of reference is set within a broader discussion of linguistic representation, which defines language as a system functioning in a three-way relationship among the individual language user, the world of experience, and the social community. It is…