Words In Print Research Articles

The politics of publishing: Selection and rejection of women's words in print

The commercial publishing industry is controlled by men and under the guise of rational and objective decision-making, it manages to produce and disseminate material that it claims to be ‘universal’ and representative of all humanity. In fact, through gatekeeping, the publishing industry selects and promotes the ideas and knowledge that effectively maintain and support the dominant male view of the world. This constitutes a rarely acknowledged ‘political’ dimension in the production of knowledge and in the publishing industry. Alternative views, such as those presented by feminists, are contained at a level where they inevitably remain marginal and without the legitimacy that the sheer volume of production and expensive promotion accord to masculist ideals and practices. Feminist publishing cannot compete in terms of scale or influence and feminist writers and feminists in publishing have to contend with the issue of marginality — both ideological and pragmatic — in a male-dominated area. ‘Book publishing, like all industries, is controlled by rich, white heterosexual men’. (West, 1978:6)

Integrating diverse knowledge sources in text recognition

The capabilities of present commercial machines for producing correct text by recognizing words in print, handwriting and speech are very limited. For example, most optical character recognition [OCR] machines are limited to a few fonts of machine print, or text that is handprinted under certain constraints; any deviation from these constraints will produce highly garbled text. This paper describes an algorithm for text recognition/correction that effectively merges a bottom-up refinement process that is based on the utilization of transitional probabilities and letter confusion probabilities, known as the Viterbi algorithm [VA], together with a top-down process based on searching a trie structure representation of a lexicon. The algorithm is applicable to text containing an arbitrary number of character substitution errors such as that produced by OCR machines.

The Role of Word Shape as a Recognition Cue in Children's Automatic Word Processing

GUTTENTAG, ROBERT E. The Role of Word Shape as a Recognition Cue in Children's Automatic Word Processing. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1981, 52, 363-366. Thirdand fifth-grade children were presented a picture-naming interference task to examine the effects of printing words in mixed typecase on children's automatic word processing. Children who were skilled at using spelling-sound correspondence rules experienced approximately equivalent amounts of interference from mixed typecase and normal typecase printed words. Children who were poor at using spelling-sound correspondence rules, however, experienced less interference from mixed typecase than from normal typecase printed words. The results are discussed in terms of individual differences in the role of word shape as a recognition cue in children's automatic word processing.

Second Thoughts on Socialization through Literature for Children

Second Thoughts on Socialization through Literature for Children Jack Zipes (bio) When we speak in the genitive about children's literature, we mean a literature aimed at children and adolescents which intercedes on behalf of civilization and its discontents to persuade young readers to abandon themselves temporarily to the style, norms, values, and images of a piece of writing. Literature for children acts as sociopsychological agent, legitimizing and subverting, cop and criminal, compelled by the same laws. It uses many disguises, masks, tricks, and illusions. Literature seduces and challenges children to take sides, see, grasp, tolerate, hate, dream, escape, and hope. Words in print form a context, a frame, in which possibilities for work and play are pictured, as projections of a better life. The frame has borders, sets limits, and curtails the view of the young reader, yet, it sometimes even seeks to contain the mind with contents that dare children to go beyond the borders. Literature for children is not children's literature by and for children in their behalf. It never was and never will be. Literature for children is script coded by adults for the information and internalization of children which must meet the approbation of adults. It is personal projection—literal participation in an institutionalized discourse about the young—an author's endeavor to behold the child and maintain the process of civilization. It is the adult author's symbolically social act intended to influence and perhaps control the future destiny of culture. At heart are notions of civility and civilization. Authors who write literature for children want to cultivate raw sensibilities, to civilize unruly passions, and to reveal unsocial forces hostile to civilization. From a historical viewpoint, this literature began to be institutionalized as a system of communication in the West toward the end of the seventeenth century as a reaction against feudal "barbarism" and absolutism to justify the rise of a bourgeois, public sphere. This new cultural system of communication has always appeared to speak for humanity. However, signs of trouble have increased within it and exposed contradictions, ultimately reflecting the perverse side of the public [End Page 19] sphere which literature for children has constantly been called upon to defend. That literature for children has its bourgeois origins in instruction is well-known. The didactic aspect, the moral lesson, the doctrinaire ideology of the Protestant Ethic were part and parcel of scripture to be learned by heart and engraved in the minds of children. Entertainment and amusement were byproducts. To enjoy literature was permissible so long as it was done with a clean mind. Within the bounds of proscription and inscription fantasy's wings were clipped. The humor of the imagination was suspect and had to be restrained. The logos of the word was to initiate the young into society through school texts, religious tracts, homilies, and didactic stories. Literature for children was first and foremost a rationalization of a social hegemony. It served to substantiate the other social and cultural institutions of the bourgeois, public sphere. These institutions such as schools, hospitals, prisons, legal establishments, commercial firms, small factories, printing houses, parliaments—and we must remember that they arose with the rise of the middle classes—demanded the production of proper children, obedient and industrious, malleable masters and workers. From the beginning, pedagogues, clergymen, publishers, and government controlled children's literature and printed books to promote their interests. Even the early fairy tales of Charles Perrault, Madame d'Aulnoy, and Madame Leprince de Beaumont paid tribute to the ruling bourgeois-aristocratic code of civilization. Whether the story was fantastic or realistic in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the purpose remained the same. Primer, biblical story, broadsheet, dime novel, almanac, fairy tale, adventure book, romance, nursery rhyme, and pictures joined together to socialize readers in accord with male-dominated cultural dictums of the growing bourgeois, public sphere. Even when some writers questioned the manipulative purpose of middle-class utilitarianism, and even when opposing factions fought tooth and nail over the welfare of the young, for imagination against rationalism, these individuals and groups always sought to set their own socialized models for the socialization of the young. The context of the texts and...

When Do Children Begin to Read: An Exploration of Four Year Old Children's Letter and Word Reading Competencies

THE DEVELOPMENT OF FOUR YEAR OLD CHILDREN'S knowledge of letters and printed words was studied to determine if preschool children begin reading, and if so, how. Two classrooms of children were observed for nine-months while they attended a universityoperated preschool. The children's parents filled out questionnaires in which they described (1) their child's interest in, and knowledge about, letters and words and (2) what role they played in helping their child learn to read. Several tests and tasks were devised to measure children's conceptual knowledge of letters, printed words and the kinds of strategies they used to learn, remember, and spell words. The results indicate when, under what circumstances, and how young children begin to read. The results suggest a natural hierarchy of knowledge development in learning to read words. With considerable parental help, children realize that letters are discriminable patterns, that letters provide clues for reading, and that sounds in words are determined by letters. These three developmental levels describe more efficient approaches to reading. Specifically, as the child becomes more attracted to letters and to figuring out what words say, he/ she uses better strategies for learning and remembering words. Thus, children who are guided by parents to attend to letters, signs, and labels and are given opportunities to read, spell, and print words, learn some of the essential rudiments of reading even before going to kindergarten.

Children’s concepts of language in learning to read

To summarize, acceptance of reading as secondary to, and dependent on, the primary activities of speaking and listening does not mean that reading is simply speech in print, albeit reading is a language-based activity. Listening and speaking seem to proceed from the meaning of the discourse to analysis; whereas written language comprehension proceeds from analysis to meaning, at least for some beginning readers and some poor readers. Analysis of speech takes place at the unconscious or tacit level; conscious analysis of segments of print (sentences, phrases, words, syllables and phonemes) is often required in reading, especially at the initial stage. Good readers pass this decoding stage relatively effortlessly; poor readers may still need to deal with the mechanics of reading before these become automatic. Thus, while children should be introduced to reading through a variety of rich language experiences, there should be a parallel process of the development of subskills.

Do Beginners Learn Printed Words Better in Contexts or in Isolation?

EHRI, LINNEA C., and ROBERTS, KATHLEEN T. Do Beginners Learn Printed Words Better in Contexts or in Isolation? CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1979, 50, 675-685. First graders were taught to read 16 words. Half of the subjects studied the words in printed-sentence contexts. Half learned the words printed singly on flash cards and listened to sentences containing the words. Posttest scores indicated that context-trained children learned more about the semantic identities of printed words, whereas flash card-trained children could read the words faster and learned more about orthographic forms. Knowledge of letter-sound mapping relationships at the lexical level was more highly correlated with word-learning performance than knowledge of single lettersound relations. Results are interpreted in terms of word identity amalgamation theory. Findings demonstrate that there is value in exploring multiple aspects of printed-word learning and the experiences which contribute to each aspect.

Do Beginners Learn Printed Words Better in Contexts or in Isolation?

Do Beginners Learn Printed Words Better in Contexts or in Isolation?

Your Words in Print

Your Words in Print

Invited essay review

Part 4 contains an index designed to help the reader locate studies within the bibliography according to information about the characteristics of sub jects, instruments used, and the general content. Studies are grouped together by number so that the reader is directed immediately to all the studies that share a particular characteristic. A concern for children's literature may be a considerable distance away from the language therapist's concern of the moment—teaching a dyslexic child that graphemes represent phonemes that can be blended into words, words in print that can expand the mind and emotion. But once that goal is accomplished, it is replaced by another—reading as both cognitive and affec tive behavior. Children's literature then does become the concern of the language therapist as well as that of the classroom teacher. Research in Children's Literature can serve as a guide into the research that attempts to identify the effects of many factors in the interaction of children and literature.

The Etymology and Current Status of "Boress"

ONE OF THE FIRST essential items of college lore learned by freshmen at Indiana University is a new vocabulary item-boress. At present this word calls for four lexical explanations, and its etymology is obscured by the fact that it was spoken long before it was written and that it derives from that bore 'to weary by being dull or uninteresting' whose own etymology is uncertain. Although the word is no longer confined to the Indiana campus,' it very probably had its origin there or near there. In fact, the first man to put the word into print suggests that he might have been present at the birth of the term. John Stempel, Professor of Journalism at Indiana University, accounts for the origin of boress in the group discussions held in the men's boarding houses in Bloomington after the First World War: 'So our ancient and accepted practice got to be known as boring, and the boys who invented the full term, boreass, were just college boys who had to be about it.' 2 From what we know of slang-particularly dialect slang-however, and its ways of creation, this descriptive theory seems very unlikely, unless the affixation of ass to words like boring could be shown to be a regular feature of Indiana dialect. So far as I know, it is not. I hope to show here that boress is a dialect creation and that dialect features can account for its etymological and semantic background, though, indeed, it may have been influenced by the experience that Stempel describes. The printing history of the word does not seem to be very significant, for it is confined to Indiana University and to Indiana student publications. All occasions of the word in print known to me after Stempel's essay of 1926 euphemize the spelling to boress. It is, however, not only the spelling of the word which has been ameliorated, but also the association with the apparently obscene combination of bore and ass. Though the pronunciation

Verbal Association by Chinese and American Students as a Function of Word Frequency and Mode of Presentation

Associations were obtained from 40 Ss each at National Taiwan University and the University of Maryland to words presented either vocally or in writing. The words varied in frequency of occurrence for both languages. American Ss produced more associations than the Taiwanese Ss under all conditions. In both samples number of associations increased with frequency of the stimulus words. Printed Chinese, however, enjoyed a significant advantage over spoken Chinese in evoking associations to infrequent words. This finding, which did not obtain for the English words, was attributed to (a) more frequent exposure of Taiwanese to low frequency words in print than in speech and (b) increased identifiability of infrequent Chinese words when printed. Implications for more effective communication between the two language communities were discussed.

The Sandwich Island Missionaries Lay The Foundation for a System of Public Instruction in Hawaii

Aside from conversions, one of the most notable achievements of the Congregational and Presbyterian missionaries sent to the Sandwich Islands under the auspices of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions was the development of an educational system for the nation. A broad enlightenment program for the islanders depended upon instruction in the indigenous tongue and this, of necessity, was delayed until the pioneer teachers had learned the language and reduced it to a written form. Nevertheless, before the evangelists were well settled at Kailau, on Hawaii, and Honolulu and Waimea, on Oahu, they made a start in English. The first classes formed in 1820 used Watt's catechism and the English Bible. Although it was desirable for the king, chiefs, and their advisers and business agents to know English, teaching such a difficult language to the common people as a whole would have required an immense expenditure of time and effort. The missionaries reasoned that if the masses were to be made literate within a reasonable period they would have to be taught in their own tongue. After the first printed sheets came from the press in the Hawaiian language, on January 7, 1822, and all were able to see their own words in print, learning to read, write, and spell was comparatively easy. Furthermore, after a definite alphabet was adopted in July 1826, every Hawaiian word was spelled precisely as it was pronounced. Any person who could combine two letters in a syllable and put two syllables together could both read and spell with readiness, which meant that Hawaiian children learned to read their language in only two or three days as compared with the years American children are obliged to spend learning our extremely non-phonetic English spelling.! This was an immense advantage to the missionaries, as it unlocked in a measure the rich volume of God's word. After the chiefs beheld their language in print they began to manifest a more lively interest in education for themselves and for their children and in the establishment and maintenance of schools for their people. Moreover, following the conversion of the sagacious Queen Regent Kaahumanu and the astute Prime Minister Kalaimoku orders and assistance were given to establish schools for the common people. After the public advocacy of instruction by the highest chiefs, in April 1824, similar action came from all parts of the kingdom. Learning also received a great impulse from the personal tours of the vigorous Kaahumanu, who went all through the islands commanding the people to listen to the Kumus, or missionary teachers, and the

What is a Dialysate?

The “Oxford Dictionary” defines ‘dialysate’ as that portion of a mixture that remains after dialysis, and quotes Attfield's “Text-book of Chemistry” (1885). The quotation shows that the part that fails to pass through the membrane is referred to. From the point of view of the lexicographer, this is perfectly satisfactory; there seems to have been no earlier use of the word in print. Graham, for example, although he coined the word ‘dialyser’ and gave a new meaning to the word ‘dialysis’ did not apparently use ‘dialysate’.