This study analyzed dialogs between 10 mothers and their children, ages 12-14, who were normally hearing or orally communicating deaf. Adolescents who were deaf displayed similar turn-taking skills to the normally hearing adolescents. Mothers of deaf adolescents did not dominate the conversation. (Author/SW)

Selected discourse behaviors of 10 elementary school children with specific language impairment (SLI) presenting expressive or combined expressive-receptive deficits were compared to each other and to two groups of controls. The two SLI subgroups varied from each other on specific measures of turn taking and cohesion. Research implications are…

This paper discusses topic management as a parameter of discourse that is essential for the establishment of coherence. The paper discusses a model for the assessment of discourse topic management, normal developmental patterns and prerequisite skills, and patterns of normal development versus disrupted topic management in specific…

This study examined the effect of emotional content on the verbal pragmatic aspects of discourse production in right-brain-damaged (RBD), left-brain-damaged (LBD), and normal control adults. In the nonemotional conditions, LBDs were particularly impaired in pragmatics, whereas in the emotional condition, RBDs demonstrated pragmatic deficits.…

This study used a performance-based model to investigate the impact of discourse demands on the pattern of morphosyntactic deficits exhibited by 10 children with specific language impairments (SLI). Findings suggest distinct deficit profiles for subgroups of children with SLI differing in receptive language abilities, not evident when syntactic…

This article elaborates a model for understanding pedagogy in online educational forums. The model identifies four key components. Intellectual engagement describes the foreground cognitive processes of collaborative learning. Communication processes operating in the background accumulate an ever richer store of shared understandings that enable…

This study examines a process-oriented ESL writing assessment called the Computerized Enhanced ESL Placement Test (CEEPT). The CEEPT at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign or its non-computerized alternative (EEPT) have since 2000 offered a daylong process-oriented writing assessment in which test takers are given extended time to plan,…

Even at an early age, children are guided by their intuitions as they write. Intuitions are the culmination of perceptions that have been internalized and synthesized into patterns. Furthermore, they take time to develop. Consequently, if systematic instruction is to play a part in the formation of intuitions about written language then it must…

A principal cause of the seeming "foreignness" in the compositions of English as a second language (ESL) university students is discussed, and an approach to correcting the problem is suggested. It is asserted that the English language compositions of ESL students reflect native language rhetorical norms which are culturally based. Discourse bloc…

Analysis of the factors that make a text coherent or non-coherent suggests that total coherence requires cohesion not only on the textual surface but on the semantic level as well. Syntactic evidence of non-coherence includes lack of formal agreement blocking a potential cross-reference, anaphoric and cataphoric references that do not follow their…

The two current approaches to teaching academic discourse are conventional and collaborative; in practice, they overlap because both are based on a "conversational model" of learning to write in college. Taxonomists and collaborationists disagree on the relative emphasis that should be placed on the various pedagogical methods:…

An oral screening test administered by an adult to a five-year-old child was transcribed and analyzed. The test was chosen as an example of a referential communication task that is also a social communication task. The analysis demonstrates that a participant in communication assumes that the other participants are employing strategies for…

SAM (Script Applier Mechanism), a computer program designed to understand stories that rely heavily on scripts (typical sequences of events in particular contexts), is described in this report. Chapter one, which discusses SAM's background, shows how causal chaining was developed to connect events in stories, presents a typical script, and…

The effects of message structure, required recall structure, and receiver apprehension on the recall of message information were studied in a 2 x 2 x 2 factorial analysis of variance with fixed effects. Subjects were 238 college students who scored either high or low in communication apprehension. A category clustering scheme was used to…

Linguistic models, especially the derivational theory of complexity, partially explain human comprehension of isolated sentences but not connected discourse. Two versions of a message, one entirely active sentences, the other entirely passive were written to compare transformational complexity. Subjects heard the messages at normal (150 wpm) rates…