Purpose: Punctuation is traditionally seen to represent grammatical structures in writing, but some authors argue that it can also reflect the intonation and pauses of speech. In two experiments, we examined the influence of grammar and prosody on adults' judgments of comma placement. Method: University students rated the appropriateness of commas…

One strategy that children might use to sort words into grammatical categories such as noun and verb is distributional bootstrapping, in which local co-occurrence information is used to distinguish between categories. Words that can be used in more than one grammatical category could be problematic for this approach. Using naturalistic corpus…

This article discusses the relationship between intonation and enunciation. The premise is that intonation performs in dependent sentences what allocution and modality perform in independent sentences. (Text is in French.) (AM)

Syntagmatics is the name given to the regular linking of speech units in speaking. In German, a rigid organization gives structural cohesion to the sentence. Ellipsis before a predicate adjective is discussed, wherein the sentence, through word order and intonation, becomes functional, although apparently syntactically anomalous. (Text is in…

The effects of speech rate, intonation, and sentence length on children's ability to imitate sentences were examined. Results indicate that adult speech is more readily imitated by children when intonation is normal, sentences are short, and speech rate is close to that of the child. (Author/AM)

This study investigates why researchers have trouble determining when learners acquire inverted and statement forms of yes/no questions. Researchers have difficulty designing studies on this subject because this area of language is not fully rule-governed or systematic. The choice of the form may be based on two speakers' foreknowledge of each…

The chapters in this volume represent a type of current psycholinguistic research that focuses both on the nature of human information processing and the coding of linguistic structure. The chapters and authors are as follows: (1) "The Wherefores and Therefores of the Competence-Performance Distinction," by V. Valian; (2) "Levels of Processing and…

This issue is devoted to first language acquisition. It includes twelve papers concerning: the acquisition of liquids ("1" and "r"); creative errors in the written syntax of deaf children; theoretical and methodological problems in the acquisition of phonology, illustrated from Greek and English: the basis of articulation; the philosophy of…