A group with closed head injury was compared to neurologically intact controls regarding the referential cohesion and logical coherence of narrative production. A sample of six stories was obtained with tasks of cartoon-elicited story-telling and auditory-oral retelling. We found deficits in the clinical group with respect to referential cohesion,…

A review of the relevant literature reveals that reading reversals, whether in sequence or orientation, comprise a very small proportion of the total errors made by even poor readers. Young children tend to make more reversals, yet this tendency generally disappears with age. Top-down theorists feel that the reversal tendency of young children is…

Points out that the "-ed" participle forms of psychological verbs such as "amuse,""offend,""disappoint," etc. are gaining increasing grammatical acceptance since the "by"-agentive phrase (passive construction) and the adverb "very" co-occur in everyday usage. Results of experiments done…

Written words are laid out in space and exist on the page all at once, but a reader can only read a few words at a time. For readers, written words are trapped in the medium of time. So how can we best organize writing for readers? Traditional techniques of organization tend to stress the arrangement of parts in space and certain metadiscoursal…

Examines referential functions of demonstratives in Chinese discourse. Findings indicate that use of the zero-demonstrative in Chinese is the unmarked form of reference roughly corresponding to the referential function of "the" or "it" in English. Demonstratives in Chinese are a marked form of reference roughly corresponding to…

The findings indicated that there were no significant differences between good and poor readers in the nature of information recalled or in their use of perceptual connectives. The type of passage, however, did have a significant effect on the number of perceptual connectives given in the recalls. (Author/NQA)

Examines comparable speech and writing samples in the British and American components of the International Corpus of English (ICE) to study properties of coordinate structures in English. Findings indicate that "and" is a primary coordinator, that "but" and "or" are more peripheral, and that the concept of…

Divided into two phases, a study investigated the differential effects of text with and without logical connectives on college developmental readers' comprehension. In the first phase, 44 sophomores from two sections of a college developmental reading course were administered a cloze comprehension exercise along with a class of 50 regular…

Seventy good readers and 70 poor readers who were students at a community college participated in a study that examined the role of adversative connectives in helping students integrate information across sentence boundaries. Three functions of adversative connectives were examined: contrast or conflict, parallel points, and foregrounding…

Good and poor explanatory essays of 40 college freshmen were analyzed for 18 cohesive ties and chains to determine the appropriateness of the cohesion system for teaching and evaluating writing. The questions that were specifically addressed were, (1) How do writers use the cohesive resources of the language? and (2) How is cohesion related to…

The form of Japanese children's personal narratives is distinctly different from that of English-speaking children. Despite follow-up questions that encouraged them to talk about one personal narrative at length, Japanese children spoke succinctly about collections of experiences rather than elaborating on any one experience. Conversations between…

The unique position of WH words in Slavic languages is discussed, with specific reference to Bulgarian and Serbo-Croatian. The multiple fronting characteristics of Bulgarian and Serbo-Croatian differ in terms of the following positions and behaviors: extraction from embedded questions; clitic placement and other indications of constituent status;…

Conference interpreting is an oral impromptu activity. Since texts delivered at conferences range from unprepared oral texts to prepared written texts, there can be clashes between the impromptu features of conference interpreting and features of prepared written texts. Knowledge of the field of discourse and of the predictability of text…

This comparative study evaluated the writing growth of 97 college freshman before and after instruction to determine if a process-centered mode of teaching had a more significant impact than a traditional form-centered mode of instruction on discourse coherence in composition. The study used a pretest/posttest, quasi-experimental design with both…

A study of native English-speakers' (N=36) and English-as-a-second-language students' (N=60) understanding of conjunctions while reading indicated that more advanced ESL students were more capable of inferencing or using available logical relationships than were intermediate ESL students. (Author/CB)