Reviews research into listening skills and processes, focusing on speech recognition, memory in processing, discourse comprehension, the challenge of accessing the listening process, the role of context and other factors influencing listening, and the relationship between listening and other language skills. Future directions in research are…

In response to criticism of his study of input processing and processing instruction, a relatively new concept in second language teaching, the author discusses a number of issues raised, including concepts underlying input processing, methodological concerns, instructional materials used in the study, the concept "traditional instruction," use of…

A study investigated the extent to which five Japanese indirectness strategies, used to make indirect requests, transfer to situations in which Japanese learners of English make indirect requests in English. The effects of language proficiency on this transferability were also examined. Subjects were 37 Japanese learners of English as a Second…

In a study of the processes used to compose a story, 12 Portuguese/English bilingual adults created narrations for 2 published, wordless picture stories and, while viewing a videotape of their narration, recalled aloud the processes they used in constructing the stories. One study was narrated in Portuguese and the other in English. The narrations…

A study investigated the acquisition of grammar-based reading routines in both first and second languages (L1 and L2). The objective was to determine whether routine integration of grammatical information to construct a semantic representation of the text is a matter of general cognitive development or language-specific learning. Subjects were…

The problem of lack of information regarding the relationship among second language students' language ability, metacognition, and reading materials is examined. The study investigates how reading strategies transfer from the native language to the second language within an interactive and compensatory processing model framework. It examines the…

Presentations from a colloquium on applications of research on natural languages to computer science address the following topics: (1) analysis of complex adverbs; (2) parser use in computerized text analysis; (3) French language utilities; (4) lexicographic mapping of official language notices; (5) phonographic codification of Spanish; (6)…

In a step toward creating a robust natural language understanding system which detects and avoids miscommunication, this artificial intelligence research report provides a taxonomy of miscommunication problems that arise in expert-apprentice dialogues (including misunderstandings, wrong communication, and bad analogies), and proposes a flexible…

Recognizing a word in a meaningful text involves processes that combine information from many different sources, and both bottom-up processes (such as feature extraction and letter recognition) and top-down processes (contextual information) are thought to interact when skilled readers recognize words. Two similar experiments investigated word…

A study explored context effects on two selected indexes of communicative competence in the narrative language of a sample of first grade children. The 30 subjects each completed 2 tasks--the retelling of a story that had been read to them and the dictation of an original story. These narratives were recorded and analyzed for linguistic competence…

Two levels of stimulus condition were used to determine whether or not the amount of salient information contained in the perceptual stimuli accompanying orally presented "wh-questions" (those including the concepts who, what, where, when, how and why) facilitates children's comprehension. Conditions varied in terms of the number of…

A paper by Keenan and Klein (1975) provided evidence for the hypothesis that conversationality is present in children as young as 2 and 1/2 years of age. Results of the study indicated that before the emergence of more adult-like coherency operations, the children passed through a period in which such operations were foreshadowed by vocal play.…

A study was conducted (1) to examine the development of comprehension and production in written language of two aspects of linguistic knowledge, knowledge of ambiguity and paraphrase; and (2) to examine the influences of reading ability as measured by currently used standardized reading tests and of sex on the development of this knowledge of…

The work described in this paper was undertaken to study children's ability to preserve semantic relations during analogical mappings. Two experiments are described based on the understanding that metaphors and analogies are mappings from one semantic region (the domain of origin) to another (the range of application), which convey the idea that…

The testing of a number of hypotheses about the effect of hearing a prior context sentence on immediate processing of a subsequent target sentence is described. According to the standard deep structure model, higher level processing (e.g. semantic interpretation, integration of context-tarqet information) does not occur immediately as speech is…