The content of 228 college student's writing samples appears to be a main determiner of how many and what types of preposition errors will appear. These results indicate that preposition errors point to cognitive lags and complex, abstract writing tasks may be the appropriate treatment. (Author/PN)

Proposes a model of word identification and tests it by examining the influence of orthographic redundancy, versatility, and letter-sound correspondences on the identification of both high- and low-frequency words by children and adults. (FL)

Reports a study which shows that subjects can make discriminative judgments of a speaker's height and weight from his tape recorded speech. This ability is not altered by the filtering of the speech signal. (PMJ)

After evaluation of 125 words was obtained on 51 separate scales, six more general factors emerged: spelling and sound, imagery and meaning, word frequency, recall, emotionality, and goodness. The claim is that multivariate research is a necessary addition to the study of verbal behavior. (PJM)

Describes a question-answering procedure for probing the reader's internal representation of prose. Examines two dimensions of a reader's conceptual organization of plot: hierarchical level and relational density of propositions. (PMJ)

Presents a tentative cognitive-psychological model of language attrition, which draws on information from studies in second language attrition, neurobiology and psychology. Notes that this model is presented to demonstrate that a model based on consideration of the brain has the potential of providing a plausible account of the process of language…

A model is proposed for the general abstracting process (using disciplines such as linguistics, logic, and psychology) that is based on a system of combined strategies with four stages: reading-understanding; selection; interpretation; synthesis. (Author/JKP)

Addressed three issues in a description of techniques used to study how people learn structured sequences. These are the content of what is learned, the role of conscious awareness in syntactic learning, and the role of limited-capacity processing or focal attention in syntactic learning. (Contains 86 references.) (Author)

Presents a longitudinal case study of a child with a phonological disorder. Demonstrates an asymmetrical pattern of consonant cluster development with two different reduction strategies. Argues that the child first represents all clusters as single underlying units, later representing only certain clusters as single units. Formulated within…

Focuses on the role of context on the processing of inflected nouns in Finnish. Identification of partitive plurals with the homonymic suffix -jA was studied by presenting the target nouns in a sentence context and by recording durations of readers' eye fixations and self-paced reading times for these targets. Results are discussed. (Author/VWL)

A study examined how languages affect memory for narrative. Forty bilingual children aged 8-9 listened to a story in either English or Greek, and then retold it in English or Greek. Unexpectedly, children who heard the story in English and retold it in Greek had significantly better story recall than other groups. Educational implications are…

The types of gesture+speech combinations children produce during the early stages of language development change over time. This change, in turn, predicts the onset of two-word speech and thus might reflect a cognitive transition that the child is undergoing. An alternative, however, is that the change merely reflects changes in the types of…

This paper analyses the effects of manipulating the cognitive complexity of L2 oral tasks on language production. It specifically focuses on self-repairs, which are taken as a measure of accuracy since they denote both attention to form and an attempt at being accurate. By means of a repeated measures design, 42 lower-intermediate students were…

The debate over whether primates can be taught visual language is examined, and evidence of use of nonverbal language in primate studies is compared with the language criteria of a number of linguistic researchers. Background information on language, visual language (including sign language), and the parameters of the studies is offered, including…

The use of verbal report procedures as a research tool for gaining insight into the language learning process is discussed. Specifically, having second language students complete think-aloud protocols when they take cloze tests can provide useful information about what is being measured and how it has been learned. Use of such introspective…