Arguing that discourse coherence can provide a window on the writing processes that produce it, this paper describes developmental differences observed in children's writing and proposes a procedural model to account for those differences. The first section of the paper points out that a developmental model of the writing process should specify…

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;…

Eighty-two undergraduate and graduate students at a major southwestern university participated in a study integrating reading research utilizing tachistoscopes with current knowledge based on analysis of reading connected texts. A tachistoscope was used to examine the nature of visual perception in relation to the ability of the subjects to apply…

An approach to text translation that focuses on understanding the original text and the writer's intentions is outlined. The approach uses a sequence of steps including: studying the text carefully, knowing the writer's background, analyzing the text, understanding the writer's use of words, normalizing the text's grammatical form, composing the…

Three experiments were conducted to test the hypothesis that a paragraph composed of sentences with identical or closely related topics would be easier to read than one whose sentence topics were only remotely related. The first experiment involved subjective judgments by 131 high school students on the readability of two paragraphs identical in…

This volume contains papers presented in connection with a symposium held in 1975 and sponsored by Abo Akademi, for the purpose of discussing ongoing research in word-order studies. Papers include: (1) a prolegomena by N.E. Enkvist; (2) "On the Ordering of Sister Constituents in Swedish," by E. Andersson; (3) "What is New…

A major problem in doing linguistic research from tape-recorded material is finding specific tape content for later, detailed analysis of data. A project on use of language in medicine being carried out at the Cornell University Medical College has developed a method of cataloguing taped material that eliminates the need for transcriptions and…

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…

This account of the intonation of English is part of ongoing research at the University of Birmingham, England. It attempts to take account of how intonation contributes to the communicative value of an act of speech. An introductory chapter provides a short discussion of some crucial terms: pitch, loudness, stress, rhythm, and tone unit. The…

This multiple case study investigated the relationship between kindergarten teachers' questions and children's responses. The classroom discussions of 4 groups of children and their teachers (all middle income level) were taped and classified into five different question and response categories. Results indicated that: (1) some teachers ask more…

In an analysis of a processing activities model of memory applied to connected discourse, 206 college students assigned to eight conditions in two studies evidenced significantly greater recall when provided with semantic level tasks than either surface feature analysis or reading control (intentional and incidental) conditions. Additionally,…

Comprehension monitoring was investigated by asking college students to read and recall passages that contained intentionally introduced confusions (inconsistent information, unclear references, and inappropriate logical connectives). Subjects were then told that confusions had been present and were asked to describe them and comment on how they…

This working paper presents a twelve-part paridigm for testing the level of concept attainment in language arts. Items were selected for three topics: words, words in sentences, and connected discourse. Within each topic concepts presented in the middle elementary grades were identified, and ten concepts were randomly selected for each topic. Each…

Analysis of the babbling of five infants indicated that between 14 and 40 percent of utterances recurred in particular contexts with a greater than expected frequency, suggesting that babbling is not entirely random but contains consistent sound-meaning relationships that are not adult-modeled. (Author/CB)

Explains how to ask questions that will help students focus on structure and better understand expository text. Notes that because students must make both internal and external connections to text structure, teachers should ask questions which prompt students to identify the relationships among ideas in a text so that meaningful learning can…