Understanding language requires readers and listeners to cull meaning from fast-unfolding messages that often contain conflicting cues pointing to incompatible ways of interpreting the input (e.g., "The cat was chased by the mouse"). This article reviews mounting evidence from multiple methods demonstrating that cognitive control plays…

Offers a tentative definition of reading comprehension, based on contemporary work in psycholinguistics and cognitive psychology; invites response and criticism. (MKM)

Constraint on syntax may be reflected in the transient processing demands of lexical retrieval suggesting syntactic-lexical processing interaction. The syntactic structure of utterances appears sensitive to the accessibility of lexical information with more accessibility occurring earlier in sentences. Models of interactions within a…

Details findings indicating that most early linguistic competence is item based. Maintains that language development proceeds without evidence of system-wide syntactic categories, schemas, or parameters. Suggests that findings are not easily explained by the development of children's skills of linguistic performance, pragmatics, or other external…

Proposing a shift in the locus of theoretical analysis of cognition, this paper argues that cognitive functioning may be more readily characterized without the mediation of long-term mental associations and structure. An account of cognition is proposed in which mental relations are transient functional relations, and in which psychological…

Describes a model that distinguishes seven types of meaning that can function in reading: discoursal, lexical, morphological, propositional, syntactic, rhetorical, and functional. (MKM)

Demonstrates through the writings of Gray, Shafer, Smith, and Goodman that although they use different terminology, there are greater similarities than differences in their points of view. (MKM)

Examines cognates (lexical items from different languages that are identified by bilinguals as being the same thing), arguing that the Cohort Model effectively explains cognate properties and that cognates should be defined in terms of their structural representations and the processes that activate and select them. (79 references) (Author/CB)

In some psycholinguistic models, processing is characterized by generation of multiple outputs using information from higher processing levels. Such models are considered autonomous in word recognition domain but interactive in sentence processing domain. This confusion arises not from differences between lexical and syntactic processing, but from…

A distinction is drawn between representational and processing models of second-language acquisition. The first approach is derived primarily from linguistics, the second from psychology. Both fields, it is argued, need to collaborate more fully, overcoming disciplinary narrowness in order to achieve more fruitful research. (GLR)

Explores several models of cognitive and structural perspectives involving minority-language situations, and attempts to integrate them into a framework of predictive propositions that elaborate psychosocial climates of maintenance, majority-minority encounter, and interactive strategies. (65 references) (Author/CB)

The second of three articles on the ways in which people formulate their observations, this paper begins with a discussion of the assumptions underlying analytical and class-based models of cognition. The analytical approach to the measurement of cognition is found to be inappropriate because human cognition, and consequently language processing…

Research addressing development of mechanistic models capable of acquiring languages on the basis of exposure to linguistic data is reviewed. Research focuses on major issues in developmental psycholinguistics--in particular, nativism and empiricism, the role of semantics and pragmatics, cognitive development, and the importance of simplified…

Focuses on concepts and arguments from psychoanalysis and presents an example of a counterargument on the slip of the tongue. The article delineates psycholinguistic accounts of speech errors, showing how these accounts can enhance a comparison of three samples of literary and nonliterary word substitutions that elucidate claims being made in…

Various communication studies have revealed the existence of a "preverbal" stage of communication consisting of centers within the brain that exists in an innate form or a form preprogrammed for future information acquired from the environment through experience (socialization). Such centers serve to prepare the individual for…