Developmental changes in the expression of contrast in child discourse were investigated. Contrast is defined as a psychological phenomenon and applied to the domain of discourse topics. The development of the ability to produce utterances that are topically related to the previous conversational turn is considered. Four types and three levels of…

Teachers are often baffled by the inability of a number of basic writing students to use the proper connective to show relationship between sentences or phrases for coherence. Most frustrating is the teacher's inadequacy in giving definitions or explanations beyond the student's textbook descriptions of the connectives. However, a cursory…

Twenty college students, ten each in the experimental and control groups, were the subjects of an experiment designed to demonstrate that integration of verb meanings occurs in connected discourse. Six paragraph-length stories, each of which included one or two critical sentences containing a general verb, were presented orally to the subjects.…

A telephone conversation was transcribed and marked for stress. A portion of the transcription, not marked for stress, was given to native English speakers who were asked to underline the word(s) in each sentence or phrase that should receive the most prominent stress. The overlap of actual stress and the assignments of the participants who were…

The following papers and reports are included: (1) "Prisoners of Code-Centred Privacy: Reflections on Contrastive Analysis and Related Disciplines" by Kari Sajavaara and Jaakko Lehtonen; (2) "The Methodology and Practice of Contrastive Discourse Analysis" by Sajavaara, Lehtonen, and Liisa Korpimies; (3) "Interactional Activities in Discourse…

Two comprehension-time experiments were conducted to identify factors affecting the comprehensibility of written materials. The subjects (a total of 52 college students for the two experiments) were presented with pairs of sentences--"context" sentences followed by "target" sentences--and were asked to relate the content of the target sentences to…

This paper presents a passage written by a student and analyzes the way in which each sentence is or is not connected to those before it and after it, revealing the problems that cause the passage to lack coherence. The paper notes that, although this writer would have benefited from an opportunity to talk out her ideas (rather than a lesson in…

This paper describes a large computer-coded conversational speech data base and results of testing phonological rules on that data base. The study shows that frequency of rule application depends not only on phonological environments, but also on frequency of occurrence of specific words. That is, some rules are highly word-dependent, others are…

Students in grades 4, 5, or 6 can learn to write more concretely, accurately, and deliberately by employing three strategies: (1) elimination of those words or phrases that garble meaning or repeat unnecessarily; (2) substitution of more specific, concrete, and generally more appropriate expressions for ones that are vague and unimaginative; and…

The model in this study illustrates a theory of the language user's performance based on an analysis of the fundamental speech episode, the dialogue. The model presents an outline of conditions for the description of strategic aspects of communication within a dynamic framework, which are dependent on the orientation of the communicator toward a…

This paper discusses one way of exploring how we perceive and understand the connections between some parts of texts, or between one sentence and the whole discourse. Understanding ellipsis involves non-syntactic understanding; the semantic structure is responsible for our understanding of elliptical sentences and encoding the knowledge contained…

As predicted, foods from categories typical of most people's restaurant schemata (conceptual framework) were better recalled by undergraduates who read a restaurant narrative, than those reading about supermarkets, a less structured schemata. Findings confirm Ausubel's notion that information which fits slots in a conceptual framework is more…

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 distribution of a small number of syntactic structures in the speech output of 102 Israeli preschoolers was examined. Findings are reported on the proportion of grammatically analyzable clauses, the patterning of word order in Hebrew child language, and the emergence of syntactic connectedness through coordination and subordination of clauses.…