Two experiments investigated whether novel phonotactic regularities, not present in English, could be acquired by 16.5-month-olds from brief auditory experience. Subjects listened to consonant-vowel-consonant syllables in which particular consonants were artificially restricted to either initial or final position. Findings in a subsequent…

Investigated potential influences of general processing capacity and sustained selective attention on the temporal processing of a group of children with specific language impairment and a group of age-matched controls. Results suggest that the SLI children did not evidence a basic temporal processing deficit. (Author/VWL)

Mental representation of how a language works is basic to language use. Such questions as how the mental representation is developed, what is represented, and the role of the representation in individual language production are considered from the perspectives of linguistic and cognitive psychological theory and one model of cognition. (46…

Five groups of subjects (n=54, ages 15-43) were assigned a repair strategy to use after misperceiving a sentence through lipreading. Strategies included asking the talker to repeat a sentence, rephrasing it, simplifying it, saying an important keyword, and speaking two sentences. Compared to controls, subjects demonstrated significantly greater…

Explores factors affecting the ease or difficulty with which new words are learned in a second language, focusing on such intralexical factors as pronuncability, length, parts of speech, inflexional complexity, derivational complexity, semantic features, abstractedness, specificity, idomaticity, register restrictions, and multiple meaning. (52…

Describes a study that concluded that children generally treat the spatial locatives "in front of" and "behind" in a nondeictic way when a referent object with an obvious front is involved. Tasks that emphasized the viewpoint of the observer, however, caused a deictic response. (GLR)

Assesses whether 30 children aged three-five years had a preferred direction in responding to "when"-questions and whether this preference could be influenced by story structure. Results indicated that children showed a preference for "after"-type responses and that productions of "before" were more likely to be…

An investigation looks at complex English sentences that are used to represent two ordered events and containing "before" or "after" subordinate clauses. It is concluded that text evidence is directly relevant to an understanding of language processing. (25 references) (Author/VWL)

Whether 10- to 14-year olds infer implied instruments when reading isolated instrument-implicit sentences as well as they do when instructed to generate such instruments was studied with 177 subjects in 2 experiments. Results indicate that spontaneous instrumental inference is less certain than previously suggested. (SLD)

Three studies examined children's learning of second labels for objects. Found that, at 24 months, subjects learned both labels equally well but had difficulty with the second label if a third word was introduced. Results suggest that, from six months on, mutual exclusivity helps children interpret novel words. (WP)

Argues that Jerome Bruner's "Acts of Meaning" (1990), which calls for a "renewed cognitive revolution" for the direction of cognitive psychology research and study, does not sufficiently identify the direction of that journey or the obstacles that need to be removed for a successful journey. (31 references) (CB)

Responds to criticisms about the author's call for a new direction in cognitive psychology research and study and defends the need for new perspectives. (one reference) (CB)

Proposes an alternative model of language comprehension regarding how people understand idioms in which literal meanings are systematically used to constrain the use and variation of conventional idioms and to generate novel idiom variance. Presents three experiments on how people process variant idioms. (SR)

Three experiments investigating the use of temporal information in a reduced relative clause to interpret verb tense of the main clause found that subjects rapidly assessed temporal information to resolve tense ambiguity, demonstrating an incremental approach to comprehension that uses previous discourse to continuously update comprehension and…

Discusses the importance, validity, and implications of the identity thesis that the P600 component of the scalp-recorded event-related potential is identical with the P3b, a domain-general component elicited by improbable task-related events. Explores epistemological complexities of the issue and discusses what the identity thesis does and does…