People differ in the size of their social network, and thus in the properties of the linguistic input they receive. This article examines whether differences in social network size influence individuals' linguistic skills in their native language, focusing on global comprehension of evaluative language. Study 1 exploits the natural variation in…

Three experiments examined the hypothesis that the demonstrative noun phrase (NP) that N, as an anadeictic expression, preferentially refers to the less salient referent in a discourse representation when used anaphorically, whereas the anaphoric pronoun he or she preferentially refers to the highly-focused referent. The findings, from a sentence…

The present article examines production and on-line processing of definite articles in Turkish-speaking sequential bilingual children acquiring English and Dutch as second languages (L2) in the UK and in the Netherlands, respectively. Thirty-nine 6-8-year-old L2 children and 48 monolingual (L1) age-matched children participated in two separate…

Research on textual enhancement (TE) has given rise to several factors that may play a role in generating learners' noticing of target forms, one of which pertains to the nature of the target form(s). In particular, results have suggested that learners are more likely to notice more meaning-bearing forms than less meaning-bearing forms.…

In this study, we used a novel cognitive paradigm and event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (ER-fMRI) to investigate the neural substrates involved in processing three different types of sentences. Participants read either metaphoric ("Some surgeons are butchers"), literal ("Some surgeons are fathers"), or non-meaningful sentences…

Three pairs of spatial antonyms (higher than/lower than, above/below, and rising away from/falling away from) were used in a task in which subjects judged whether a sentence accurately described a previously presented pictorial relationship. Subjects' reaction times were used as the dependent measure. Since all three word pairs were used…

Describes a study that tested deaf and hearing readers' sensitivity to the morphological structure of English words by using a lexical decision (word/non-word classification) task. Results indicate that despite prelingual and profound hearing impairment, it is possible to acquire a sensitivity to the morphophonological structure of English words.…

Reviews research concerning instructional applications of discourse analysis for student reading and writing, including large-scale studies of student writing, text-based studies, reading comprehension, and semantic mapping. A large unannotated bibliography is included. (CB)

This report describes part of a longer study on sentence comprehension. The long range goal is to identify distinct levels of processing in terms of the types of linguistic and extralinguistic information each level uses. The focus of this part of the study is sentences with filler-gap relations, such as, "This is the girl the teacher wanted to…

Describes a means of characterizing one of many semantic aspects of young children's comprehension ("necessity for linking"). This semantic aspect is then used to experimentally clarify sentence processing results that are ambiguous at the syntactic level. (HOD)

An experiment is reported which permitted the separate examination of sentence comprehension processes and subsequent sentence memory processes. The similarity between the results of comprehension and recall was discussed in terms of a retrieval process that may be similar in both tasks. (Author/RM)

Two fundamental assumptions guide this survey of recent research on anaphora. The first is that anaphoric expressions do not refer to segments in a text or discourse, but to entities that are assumed to be in the language receiver's mind. The second assumption is that a text serves to suggest the referents for anaphora, as does the nonlinguistic…

Three experiments investigated the hypothesis that, when interpreted in context, general terms are typically encoded on the basis of an instantiation. The results indicated that a particular term naming the expected instantiation of a general term was a better cue for the recall of a sentence than the general term itself, even though the general…

Four versions of several paragraphs had the same second sentence and were referentially coherent, but they differed in causal relatedness of the two sentences. Results showed that despite referential coherence, recognition and recall memory for the causes was poorest for the most and least related causes and best for causes of intermediate…

This report addresses the nature of the knowledge people possess about word meanings, and how this knowledge is acquired and used in reading comprehension. The report outlines a "standard model" of word meanings which equates word meanings with critical features, or necessary and sufficient conditions for serious, literal use of a word.…