Current views on the acquisition of PRO can roughly be divided into two areas: lexical and syntactic accounts. We present data on one verb, "decide," that yields data that not only differs from the data for other similar verbs with the same children, but does not lend itself easily to either type of account. Data from a sentence elicitation task…

Three experiments were conducted to test the phonological recoding hypothesis in visual word recognition. Most studies on this issue have been conducted using mono-syllabic words, eventually constructing various models of phonological processing. Yet in many languages including English, the majority of words are multi-syllabic words. English…

School success in the 21st century requires proficiency with expository discourse--the use and understanding of informative language in spoken and written modalities. This occurs, for example, when high school students read their textbooks and listen to their teachers' lectures, and later are asked to demonstrate their knowledge of this complex…

This review highlights recent doctoral research in the United States completed between the spring of 2006 and the fall of 2007 in the areas of language teaching and language learning. Topics of particular interest included language policy, second/foreign language pragmatics, computer-mediated communication, non-native-speaking teachers, academic…

Patients with lesions of the left hemisphere often suffer from oral-facial apraxia, apraxia of speech, and aphasia. In these patients, visual features often play a critical role in speech and language therapy, when pictured lip shapes or the therapist's visible mouth movements are used to facilitate speech production and articulation. This demands…

Reports on experiments that address the question of whether pictures and the words that name them access a common conceptual representation. Results suggest that the major component in a lexical or objective decision is a form-specific memory representation of the work or visual object. (EKN)

Finds confirmation of the humanizing influence of language in anthropological and linguistic studies, in creation myths, and in the lives of individuals such as Anne Frank and Helen Keller. Sees in George Orwell's "1984" and Jonathan Swift's "Gulliver's Travels" examples of the dehumanization created by empty or deceptive…

Presents study designed to further evaluate the nature of spoken-language comprehension under conditions of varying perceptual load by manipulating different comprehension conditions. Investigates effects of subsidiary task paradigms on course of simultaneous comprehension processing. Argues that these can only be used when accompanied with probes…

Presents and analyzes two experiments designed to explore the role of the syllable in perceptual segmentation of words. Results suggest the subjects' detection response probably precedes lexical access and is based on the prelexical code. (Author/BK)

Supplements Hans Basboll's state-of-the-art report on generative phonology (EJ 227 659), focusing on "abstract" v "concrete" approaches to surface data. Includes a summary of a discussion on phonology. (RL)

Responds to Ellis (2002), which suggests the statistical structure of the linguistic environment is a crucial and relatively neglected variable in language learning. This approach makes three assumptions about cognition and language learning that are not universally shared. Describes a distributed, instance-based approach that retains key features…

Describes a study that concluded that children generally treat the spatial locatives "in front of" and "behind" in a nondeictic way when a referent object with an obvious front is involved. Tasks that emphasized the viewpoint of the observer, however, caused a deictic response. (GLR)

An investigation looks at complex English sentences that are used to represent two ordered events and containing "before" or "after" subordinate clauses. It is concluded that text evidence is directly relevant to an understanding of language processing. (25 references) (Author/VWL)

Argues that Jerome Bruner's "Acts of Meaning" (1990), which calls for a "renewed cognitive revolution" for the direction of cognitive psychology research and study, does not sufficiently identify the direction of that journey or the obstacles that need to be removed for a successful journey. (31 references) (CB)

Responds to criticisms about the author's call for a new direction in cognitive psychology research and study and defends the need for new perspectives. (one reference) (CB)