Understanding the place of consciousness in second language acquisition (SLA) is crucial for an understanding of how acquisition occurs. Considerable work has been done on this topic, but nearly all of it assumes a highly non-modular view, according to which language and its development is "nothing special". As this assumption runs…

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)…

It is proposed in this paper that a developmental continuum functions between metaphors and the perception of metaphoric referents in both ordinary and aesthetic language use, and three levels of the metaphoring act are isolated: perceptual, analogical, and evaluative. These levels appear justified in terms of their functional association with…

Assesses the relationship between production deficits and speech perception abilities. A categorical perception paradigm was administered to a group of communication disordered children and to a matched control group. Group results are tentatively interpreted as showing a moderate perceptual deficit in the communication disordered children of this…

The relation definition theory proposed in this paper is explicitly different from previous semantic memory theories since it is the first to make a relation's definition the basis of semantic processing. The paper suggests that this relation definition theory successfully predicts relation similarity on the basis of one key primary assumption:…

Discusses the theoretical foundation for Ferguson's correlation between speed in detecting syntactic errors in written English and acquisition of the listening comprehension skill. A detailed analysis of Ferguson's procedure is given along with references to other pertinent literature. The original conclusions are questioned. (AMH)

The testing of a number of hypotheses about the effect of hearing a prior context sentence on immediate processing of a subsequent target sentence is described. According to the standard deep structure model, higher level processing (e.g. semantic interpretation, integration of context-tarqet information) does not occur immediately as speech is…

One hundred and twenty kindergarten and second grade children from three different language environments were given a perceptual matching test and a verbal communication test to examine the relationship between language and cognitive performance. The object of the study was to focus on the cognitive processing demands imposed by the linguistic…

A multiple choice Metaphor Preferences Test was administered to 138 preschool through college subjects to determine the role of a metaphor's ground in determining a metaphor's appeal, and to document the evolution of preferences for different types of grounds. Ground is the common property that links the two terms of a metaphor (topic and…

Focusing on the acquisition of semantic features and the relation between semantic and perceptual features, this study further tests the "semantic feature hypothesis," where a child acquires full adult word meaning component by component, and its complementary "correlation hypothesis," which claims that the source of these semantic features lies…

One hundred and twenty kindergarten and second grade children from 3 different language environments (40 Mexican Spanish-speaking children from Monterrey, Mexico, and 40 Chicano Spanish-speaking children and 40 English-speaking children from the same public elementary school in Houston, Texas) were given a perceptual matching test and a verbal…

One of a regular series on the status and progress of studies on the nature of speech, instrumentation for its investigation, and practical applications, this report covers the period January 1 to March 31, 1985. Studies summarized in the report cover such topics as (1) segmentation of coarticulated speech in perception (2) intrinsic time in…

This is a report of a study conducted by a group of teachers to discover the extent to which students in the first three years of school were aware of the phonetic system of their native language (French) with emphasis on the means they used to analyze it. In the first year, the children discovered phonetic oppositions by touching their lips and…