Semiotics, the study of signs, is a relatively new and highly controversial area. Symbols, icons, and indexes represent the three types of signs. Semantics, pragmatics, and syntactics represent the three basic semiotic areas, with pragmatics having a growing influence in oral language and reading. A comprehensive view of curriculum is implicit in…

A study to develop a methodology for discovering how one important notion or semantic category, "frequency of occurrence," is expressed in words, phrases, or other linguistic devices in academic English began with a search for devices expressing that notion, by analyzing text from a news magazine, a New Zealand geography textbook, and a…

A common error in children's attempts to solve verbal analogies is to respond with a word strongly associated with the third term in the analogy. This is known as associative response. A study was conducted to investigate the cognitive processes underlying this response. Subjects, 112 fifth grade students, were administered a battery of tests…

Addresses the issue of vocabulary in the English as a Foreign Language classroom and introduces a technique for interlingual lexico-semantic comparison: the lexigram. This technique is based on restricted word-association data gathered from native speakers of English and Spanish and gives insights into vocabulary development. (Author/PJM)

This study investigated sensitivity to morphological, semantic, and syntactic cues to grammatical gender among 64 students of college-level Italian. Results showed sensitivity to cues in word-final phonemes, but low awareness of gender associations of derivational suffixes. Students had more difficulty dealing with multiple cues, particularly when…

Part of a 20-year Yugoslav Serbocroatian-English Contrastive Project, this study is intended to make students, teachers, textbook writers, and scholars aware of elements in the system of English modals that might cause difficulties to the native Serbocroatian-speaking learner of English. An eclectic method of contrastive analysis consisting of…

The revised second edition of a 1976 book explores the literature of research on memory, creation of meaning in language learning, and second language teaching methodology, incorporating results of recent work in those areas. Each of the 12 chapters begins with a series of questions to be addressed and ends with further questions. Chapter topics…

This study analyzed verbal responses of status unequals in situations where a linguistic mistake occurred. Subjects were 80 native Turkish-speaking university students (28 males, 52 females) who participated in role-playing exercises using such situations. Two aspects of the responses were investigated: the semantic and syntactic formulas that…