Discusses prevailing ideas of how children learn language and addresses the argument of rules versus analogies in learning to form the past tense of verbs. Cites cases involving connectionist models. (ML)

Shows that hesitation phenomena are intricately connected with propspective and retrospective speech production tasks and mark critical points in processing. Two major hesitation categories exist: stalls and repairs. Stalls head off errors and represent error-free output; repairs take care of errors already committed. English and German examples…

Indicates that the direction of articulatory substitution for 13 consonants is identical to the direction of auditory perceptual substitution defined by shifts of phonological features. (Author/RL)

Examined large corpus of spontaneous English conversation for pronunciation of "the" and speech patterns immediately following. Found that speakers use "thiy" (versus "thuh") pronunciation to signal immediate suspension of speech to deal with a problem in production; problems were at many levels of production, including articulation, word…

Twenty-two hyperactive children were more spontaneously talkative than controls during transitions and nonverbal tasks (nonelicited conditions), but less talkative when asked to tell stories (elicited conditions). Findings suggest that minimal stimulus input precipitate excessive verbal activity from hyperactive children, while stories requiring…

Demonstrates that the contextual probability of lexical items in a continuous sample of spontaneous speech, as measured by the predictability of words in context, is related to word frequency. (Author/RL)

A discussion of teacher talk, particularly in the context of language immersion, looks at its nature, content, and form. A study reported here indicates the importance of discourse modification by the teacher and points up the need for further research on the effects of teacher talk on second-language learning. (Contains 23 references.)…

Investigated the developmental processes that lead from a literal interpretation of idiomatic expressions to the ability to comprehend and produce them figuratively. Results showed that younger children are more literally oriented than older children, who in turn are more idiomatically oriented, and that children of both age groups found it more…