Describes a study of 40 monolingual Spanish-speaking Peruvian children in which comprehension of six locative phrases was tested. Results are analyzed in terms of developmental sequence, locative acquisition, the effects of intrinsic label on projective locative comprehension, the effects of linguistic form, and the effects of context. (SED)

Relationships between syntactic and semantic aspects of mothers' speech and infants' word acquisition was examined in 27 mother-infant dyads. Results indicated that the more the mother differentiated the complexity of her speech to child and adult, the earlier the child attained 20 words. The more the mother used adult-basic labels in her speech,…

Examines the development of children's knowledge about the presuppositions of cognitive verbs that take sentential complements. Results indicate that the presuppositions of the factives "know,""forget," and "remember" and the nonfactive "think" are not learned until age four. "Believe," which has factive and nonfactive properties, is mastered…

Investigates the comprehension of nine intonational contrasts in ten-year-olds and adults. Overall performance on the tasks was much lower among the children than among the adults. Results indicate that hypotheses concerning the chronological order of development of meanings dependent on groupings, nucleus placements, and tones are too simplistic.…

Analysis of storage, retention and retrieval in standard free recall, extended free recall, and repeated recall after a single presentation indicates that most recall failures are retrieval failures, and that extended recall decreases retrieval failure and increases consistent retrieval. (Author/RM)

Young children found it difficult to verify negative statements, but found affirmative statements, affirmative questions, and negative questions equally easy to deal with. It is proposed that children acquire the answering system earlier than the verification system, and use answering to verify statements before acquiring the verification system.…

A set of four experiments investigates the relationship between phonological coding and reading ability, using a picture-word interference task and a decoding task. Results with regard to both adults and children suggest that while poor readers possess weak decoding skills, good and poor readers show equivalent evidence of direct semantic and…

Examines the effects of having both a semantic and a superficial perceptual category for organizing lists of words in free recall. Discusses the effect of individual difference characteristics, such as personality characteristics of the subject, on the results. (EKN)

Different experimental techniques for empirical assessment of children's linguistic ability have produced conflicting evidence. A number of such contradictions are discussed, in the context of an analysis of the potential weaknesses, and consequent requirements, of both comprehension and production tasks. (A commentary by P. L. Harris appears on…

A model of the structure of complex words based on an organization of the internal lexicon by shared-meaning content is proposed. Results of traditional linguistic experiments testing the hypothesis show that meaning content is a more salient basis for judgments of similarity and difference than is meaning structure. (PMJ)

Analyzes the perceptual problems of 22 nonnative speakers of English who transcribed spontaneous speech. Finds that perception resembles a matching of the listener's projection and the incoming acoustic information, that native/nonnative perception strategies were similar, and that hesitation phenomena were important sources of nonnative speakers'…

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…

Examined capacity of 4-month olds to identify their maternal language (Catalan or Spanish) when phonologically similar languages are contrasted. Compared infants from monolingual and bilingual environments to analyze whether differences in linguistic background affect this behavioral response. Found that language discrimination is already possible…

Comments on changes in the relation between experimental psychology and second language acquisition research. Notes that new themes borrowed from experimental psychology include practice effects, the power law, connectionism, implicit learning and miniature artificial languages. Argues that attempts to attribute language learning to implicit or…

Responds to an Ellis (2002), which focuses on frequency in language processing, language use, and language acquisition, Emphasizes the importance of placing frequency in an overarching theoretical framework of language acquisition. (Author/VWL)