The authors present an overview of recent research conducted in the field of language production based on papers presented at the first edition of the International Workshop on Language Production (Marseille, France, September 2004). This article comprises two main parts. In the first part, consisting of three sections, the authors review the…

An investigation of children's metalinguistic and metacognitive competencies examined children's sensitivity to the verbs of cognition in two related studies using a task designed to measure mastery of verbs of saying and meaning. In the task the children hear six short stories, each ending with a statement containing one of the verbs…

Three experiments used "rhyme priming," a methodology in which lexical decisions to a visually presented word are facilitated when the word is preceded by a rhyming word, to investigate the access and maintenance of speech-based codes in sentence comprehension. In these experiments, the pairs were visually dissimilar rhymes, such as…

The ACT theory of the learning of procedures is described. ACT is a computer simulation program that uses a propositional network to represent knowledge of general facts and a set of productions (condition action rules) to represent knowledge of procedures. There are currently four different mechanisms by which ACT can make additions and…

Although techniques of autosuggestion in personal development have a long history in some Eastern cultures, suggestibility as a character trait first came into focus in the West with the "animal magnetism" of Franz Mesmer. The uncovering of the nature and phenomena of hypnosis resulted in a steady and enduring interest in this state of…

An explanatory linguistic theory attempts to capture and explain the universal nature of human language, to choose among possible grammars of each human language, and to account for the linguistic constraints involved in language acquisition. Discourse theory, like linguistic theory, must be mentalistic in that it seeks to account for mental…

This study examines two views of lexical storage and word production, a derivational hypothesis and an independent unit hypothesis. Reaction times and errors were related to derivational complexity. A model of lexical retrieval process incorporating derivational processes is proposed. (Author/SW)

A technique that can be used to study the effects of low-level, rote, repetitive (Type I) rehearsal is introduced and validated. The technique is then used to investigate the relationship between the amount of Type I rehearsal and recognition memory performance. (Author/RM)

Examines how one interprets and reacts to dirty-word descriptors. Subjects judged how much they would like a fictitious person described with dirty and non-dirty adjective pairs. Liking was influenced by: (1) semantic interpretation, (2) intrinsicalness of the adjective for the person described, and (3) contextual relations between speaker and…

Three experiments were conducted to study the inferencing processes involved in anaphoric reference. Results show that an anaphora activates both its referent and concepts when in the same proposition as the referent, and that all three, when in the same proposition, are connected in the long-term representation of a text. (PJM)

Previous research has reported instances in which some two-year-olds failed to overextend in comprehension what they overextended in use. Fremgen and Fay found no instance of overextension in comprehension in separate experiments. From this Fremgen and Fay conclude children never overextend in comprehension. This conclusion is re-evaluated here.…

Analyzed construction of approximative expressions with two numerals in Dutch. Found that choice of number words was not arbitrary and that various kinds of factors are involved. Results suggest that analogue magnitude code is used in estimating and comparing, and human cognition seems to be able to perform simple calculations with quantities,…

Used a semantic and morpho-syntactic priming paradigm to examine at which processing stage the advantage of blind adults may arise. Concludes that the faster speech comprehension skills of blind adults may originate from a more efficient perceptual analysis rather than from a more extended use of semantic or morpho-syntactic context information.…

Provides an experimental validation of Landau and Gleitman's (1985) syntactic bootstrapping procedure on how children may use syntactic information to learn new verbs. The children's choice of the correct referent for a given verb versus a nonsense verb in two syntactic structures is explained. (37 references) (GLR)

Discusses connectionist techniques that can be used for modeling perception, memory, and language processing, concentrating on a class of network with dual-weight connections in which each connection has both short- and long-term weight and describes a novel architecture in which the short- and long-term weights are independent. (45 references)…