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,…

Two articles describe a model for processing natural-language queries in information retrieval systems. Part I proposes a language interface based on fuzzy set techniques to handle the uncertainty inherent in natural-language semantics. Part II develops a model of the retrieval system and describes an implementation using a knowledge-based systems…

Studied bilingual children and children learning a second language using a picture-word interference task. The printed distractors interfered with naming both on trials where the distractor and naming language were the same and on trials where they were different. These and other results question whether an "input switch" operates for bilingual…

A solution is proposed to the traditional, unexplained use of optional backshifting in teaching past tenses of English verbs. The solution is based on correct and explicit formulation of the past tense examples used, so that optional backshifting would be unnecessary and inappropriate. (MSE)

Describes experiment involving categorization of foreign words into abstract and concrete ratings to determine which were better learned under word pair and context conditions. Native language sentences were prepared in which foreign words were inserted to test whether foreign language students could correctly choose native words to replace…

Discusses three experiments which investigated the role of convention and context in understanding indirect requests. Experiments 1 and 2 showed the wide variety of conventions used and how context determines conventionality. Experiment 3 showed how conventional requests take less time to process than nonconventional ones. (Author/PJM)

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)

Describes the cross-modal semantic priming paradigm, including its underlying rationale and the different tasks with which it is combined. Introduces the type of stimuli used and the dependent and independent variables typically manipulated; discusses the paradigm's main advantages and drawbacks; and considers its most important areas of…

Offers resolutions to the paradox of infants' ability to abstract patterns over specific items and toddlers' lack of ability to generalize patterns over specific English words/constructions. Argues that contradictions are rooted in differing methodologies and stimuli content. Suggests that the patterns infants extract from linguistic input are not…

Describes an alternate lexico-semantic view of native language acquisition and adult second language learning that proposes that humans acquire and learn words, names, titles, expressions, sayings, and formulas as undifferentiated lexical items first and then develop systems to store and retrieve the lexemes and combine them into phrases and…

Argues that competence in academic subjects depends on mastery of their specialized patterns of language use. These patterns are described in terms of: 1) the semantics underlying Halliday's functional linguistics and 2) the structural analysis of communication genres. A sample classroom episode illustrates relationships among semantic…

Environmentally contaminated speech errors (irrelevant words or phrases derived from the speaker's environment and erroneously incorporated into speech) are hypothesized to occur at a high level of speech processing, but with a relatively late insertion point. The data indicate that speech production processes are not independent of other…

A review is offered of various bilingual memory studies that have been carried out during the past quarter century. Most of the studies have employed lexical items as the investigative tool, tested outside of a grammatical or semantic context. (Contains 58 references.) (JL)

Three experiments investigated the nature of productive forward linking (from semantics to syntax) and productive reverse linking (from syntax to semantics) in language-impaired children. Found that the normally developing control subjects showed a good use of productive forward and reverse linking, whereas the language-impaired subjects…

Derived equivalence relations, it has been argued, provide a behavioral model of semantic or symbolic meaning in natural language, and thus equivalence relations should possess properties that are typically associated with semantic relations. The present study sought to test this basic postulate using semantic priming. Across three experiments,…