This is the first collection of research studies to explore the potential for mixed methods to shed light on foreign or second language learning by young learners in instructed contexts. It brings together recent studies undertaken in Cameroon, China, Croatia, Ethiopia, France, Germany, Italy, Kenya, Mexico, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Tanzania and…

The game "Giant Steps" was described. It was designed to aid children in the semantic development of verbs. The purpose of the experimental evaluation was to determine whether playing the game actually did influence the associative structure of those verbs and adverbs that are "guessed" words in the game. Third graders from two classrooms in an…

The priority effect being studied is higher first-list than second-list recall induced by the absence of an immediate test on the first list. The hypothesis that this effect is caused by the subject's expectation of a later test was tested in this experiment. (Author/RM)

Subjects compared the magnitudes of pairs of concepts from the semantic orderings of time, quality and temperature. Results showed that the semantic representations of ordered terms contain subjective magnitude information. (Author/RM)

Explores the extent and accuracy of the subject's knowledge concerning his previous memory performance. (Author/RM)

It was hypothesized that Ss hearing sentences containing reported utterances would confuse these sentences with new sentences containing illocutionary forces or perlocutionary effects consistent with the original sentences. Predicted effects were found in recall for illocutionary forces and in recognition memory for perlocutionary effects.…

Three experiments investigated factors influencing the integration of facts acquired from texts. Subjects encountered related facts in the context of relatively long, meaningful texts, a single text, or in two separate texts. Results indicate that integration can occur in both cases. (SW)

This paper reports a study employing stimulated recall protocols to investigate how L1 English-speaking learners of L2 German use their metalinguistic knowledge during the resolution of selected form-focused tasks. Verbal report data from 10 university level learners were analysed to gain insight into explicit knowledge in action during controlled…

Two experiments explore the activation of semantic information during spoken word recognition. Experiment 1 shows that as the name of an object unfolds (e.g., lock), eye movements are drawn to pictorial representations of both the named object and semantically related objects (e.g., key). Experiment 2 shows that objects semantically related to an…

An experiment tested the hypothesis that the memory representation of a text is a hierarchical structure in which information is ordered from most important to least important. Sentences that tested topic information were verified faster and more accurately than sentences that tested detail information. (Author/RM)

Describes a semantic priming task using both words and pictures as primes and targets in an investigation of the order of access to certain kinds of stored information. Results suggest that naming represents a shallower level of processing than categorization for both words and pictures. (EKN)

The hypothesis that free recall involves the generation of candidate items followed by a decision process was tested in a situation which compared a standard recall test with a test that involved the overt generation and recognition of candidate items. (SW)

A study examined 12 preschool children's early use of "who,""what," and "which" questions in spontaneous speech. Results indicated that children began to ask object questions before they asked subject questions, and acquired argument questions before adjunct questions. It was suggested that the two results could…

In understanding comprehension as the active processing of reading material, and in assuming that certain key content is stored in the memory, then mnemonic cues could be one important means of recalling this stored information. Since associative words apparently have high mnemonic cue value, they have been the subject of numerous investigations.…

Norms of free association to common ambiguous English words are reported. Responses were categorized on the basis of sense relevance. On this basis, the sense dominance of the words was quantified, and the degree of ambiguity associated with each word estimated by the information measure U. This publication will be of interest primarily to…