Volume 15 (2011): Issue 2 (January 2011)

The aim of the work was to research learning style distribution in Georgian university students to determine which styles or their complexes are optimal in foreign language learning in similar conditions of teaching. Learning style preferences of more and less successful students were compared using a standardized test (Ehrman, 1998). An analysis of frequencies does not reveal reliable differences between more successful and less successful students. A statistically reliable correlation between varieties of styles was detected only in more successful students, giving grounds to conclude that successful students use diverse and multiple styles, while less successful ones are mostly stuck with one style.

The role of different orthographic units (letters, syllables, words) in reading of orthographically transparent Finnish language was studied by independently manipulating the number of letters (NoL) and syllables (NoS) in words and pseudowords and by recording eye movements during repeated reading aloud of these items. Fluent adult readers showed evidence for using larger orthographic units in (pseudo)word recoding, whereas dysfluent children seem to be stuck in a letter-based decoding strategy, as lexicality and item repetition decreased the NoL effect only among adult readers. The NoS manipulation produced weak repetition effects in both groups. However, dysfluent children showed evidence for word-specific knowledge by making fewer fixations on words than pseudowords; moreover, repetition effects were more noticeable for words than pseudowords, as indexed by shortened average fixation durations on words due to item repetition. The number of fixations was generally reduced by repetition among dysfluent children, suggesting familiarity-based benefits perhaps at the perceptual level of processing.

The purpose of this paper is to compare the earliest stages in the ontogeny of coordinate constructions - both phrasal and sentential - in the development of children acquiring two genetically and structurally related languages, Polish and Bulgarian. The data regarding Polish are excerpted from the speech production of 3 of the children belonging to Szuman's corpus included in CHILDES; the Bulgarian data come from 3 Bulgarian subjects whose language development was traced by the author of this paper. The results show that for both languages, the earliest and most primitive forms of coordination consist of sequences containing two or more NPs with existential semantics. The further acquisition of coordinate constructions displays two lines of development. The first line concerns phrasal coordinate constructions including subject, object and adverbial coordinate phrases, whereas the second line affects the development of sentential coordination. The two developmental lines take their course more or less simultaneously, that is, children produce phrasal coordinate constructions on one hand and two types of sentential coordination on the other: such that can be transformed into phrasal coordinate structures by means of the operation of deletion, and such that cannot, so-called irreducible coordinate sentences. Language specificity did not prove to play any important role in the development of coordination in the speech of the Polish and the Bulgarian children. The analyses and discussions emphasize the interplay between children's cognitive, communicative and linguistic development.

The article discusses the relationships between a sense of alienation and the use of mass media. This discussion was triggered by the idea of the media's significant power in the lives of individuals and their ability to meet fundamental needs. Given the fact that the level of a sense of alienation implies the level of citizens' socio-political activity, defining the role of the media focuses on their importance in the process of building a civil society.