Reviews research pertaining to metalinguistic awareness in young children; examines issues related to the direction of cause between metalinguistic abilities and reading, disparities in research methodology between studies, and commercial instruments perporting to measure metalinguistic knowledge; and offers implications for reading instruction…

Reports on research examining the effect of linguistic presupposition on the solving of three-term series problems. (Author/RM)

The ways that children and adults use their limited cognitive processes in comprehending the complex input of a second language are discussed, and an information-processing approach to second-language learning is proposed and supported in a number of areas of second language research. Implications for research and teaching are examined. (MSE)

Indicates that the way different languages reduce speech to script affects how visual information is processed in the brain, suggesting that the relation between script and speech underlying all types of writing systems plays an important part in reading behavior. Compares memory performance of native English/Chinese speakers. (JN)

Experiments demonstrating that perceptual identification and recognition memory both rely on memory for single prior processing episodes, contrary to common assumption, are reported. The balance between data-driven and conceptually-driven processing in reading is explored, and the effects of changing the subject's reliance on one or the other…

The question of what constitutes a minimal appropriate context for understanding a metaphor is examined through the relative effectiveness of three types of contextual priming for metaphor comprehension. All three produced immediate and automatic metaphor comprehension. The use of context to disambiguate both literal and nonliteral speech messages…

Studies the perceptual relationship between temporal "before" and "after" and their spatial counterparts. Adults reported temporal "before" related to spatial "after" and temporal "after" related to spatial "before." Three-year old children better understood spatial "after" and spatial "before," suggesting a temporal/spatial semantic acquisition…

Two experiments examined the role of presupposed (or old) and focal (or new) information in integrating sentences, by measuring comprehension time for various combinations of presupposed and focal information. (Author/AM)

Examines 158 examples of malapropisms and determines three possible sources of this type of error: (1) childhood errors that were never corrected, (2) other kinds of imperfect learning, and (3) breakdown in the storage and retrieval system of the mental lexicon. (AM)

Two experiments showed the proportion of recalled words recognized to be higher than expected when the experiment was conducted under typical study conditions. Under special study conditions, the proportion of recalled words recognized more closely approximated expected values. Exceptions depend on encoding operations rather than on the properties…

Investigates the relative effect of two types of explicit grammar instruction on learners' ability to interpret and produce sentences containing the French causative. Indicates processing instruction is as effective as traditional instruction in enabling learners to interpret the French causative; traditional instruction is more effective in…

The main difference between the information-processing and Bialystok's Analysis/Control framework for first and second language learning is in their focus. The latter is equipped mainly to account for performance differences on metalinguistic tasks, while the former accounts for construction and reconstruction of implicit and explicit mental…

By presenting two theories of first and second language learning dichotomously, their fundamental similarity as information-processing theories is obscured and details of both positions are misrepresented. (Author/MSE)

This article reviews the work on patients who have undergone partial or complete brain bisection and addresses the concept of modularity from three different perspectives: (1) structure-function correlations; (2) modular components of cognitive processes; and (3) integration of modular processes. Several brain pictures and diagrams are presented.…

This study found that 30 children with reading disability (RD) performed more poorly than 30 children with normal reading achievement on tasks of serial rapid naming, verbal fluency, letter-based word retrieval, and articulatory speed. RD children had significantly longer reaction times and production durations on the serial naming task. Findings…