Examines whether the "foreign language effect", that is, a temporary decline of thinking ability during foreign language processing, is larger when similarity between a foreign language and a native language is less. The results of two divided-attention experiments indicate that this effect was larger when the native tongue was less…

Presents two probe recognition experiments investigating whether overt and null pronouns in American Sign Language (ASL) similarly reactivate their referents during online sentence comprehension. Both experiments indicated that an important link exists between spatial verb agreement and the ASL pronomial system and that nonreferent inhibition does…

Describes a graphic modeling, natural language processing system, VerbalImage, which mimics features of human shape reasoning. Subjects read the same text description and were able to recognize the image generated by the computer from among a series of other computer-generated images. Performance on task was as good as for a control group…

Native Spanish early and late acquirers of English and Vietnamese early and child acquirers of English made grammaticality judgments of sentences in their second language. Native acquirers of English were not distinguishable from native English speakers, whereas native Spanish late acquirers had difficulty with all aspects of the grammar tested…

A study examined how languages affect memory for narrative. Forty bilingual children aged 8-9 listened to a story in either English or Greek, and then retold it in English or Greek. Unexpectedly, children who heard the story in English and retold it in Greek had significantly better story recall than other groups. Educational implications are…

Two experiments evaluated young children's use of lexical inference. Found that equivalent transfer occurred when both clue-word pronunciation and orthography were present at transfer and when only the pronunciation of the clue word was given, but not when the clue word was pre-taught. Improvements from pre-taught clue words sharing rimes or vowel…

Outlines a psycholinguistic model of vocabulary acquisition in a second language in an instructional setting. The model is based on an understanding of the representational characteristics of the second language lexicon. (Author/VWL)

Two experiments were conducted to determine whether a parser's on-line processes are affected by manipulation of case markings in Korean sentence processing, and to evaluate the usefulness of a Ranked Flagged Serial Parser model in predicting Korean ambiguity resolution processes. (Author/VWL)

Used head-mounted eye-tracking system to study kindergartners' and adults' moment-by-moment language processing ability as they responded to spoken instructions. Found that 5-year-olds did not take into account relevant discourse/pragmatic principles when resolving temporary syntactic ambiguities and showed little/no ability to revise initial…

Explains some major problems related to the subject indexing process and proposes semiotics as a framework for understanding the interpretive nature of the process. Explores the approach to studies of indexing and library and information science suggested by Fairthorne, Blair, Benediktsson, and others. Offers an explanation of what occurs in the…

Describes the Thai Learning System, which is designed to help learners acquire the Thai word order system. The system facilitates the lessons on the Web using HyperText Markup Language and Perl programming, which interfaces with natural language processing by means of Prolog. (Author/VWL)

With the increasing levels of access to higher education in the United Kingdom, larger class sizes make it unrealistic for tutors to be expected to identify instances of peer-to-peer plagiarism by eye and so automated solutions to the problem are required. This document details a novel algorithm for comparison of suspect documents at a sentence…

Background: The remediation of pragmatic problems forms a significant part of the caseload for professionals working with children with communication problems. There is little systematic evidence that demonstrates the benefits of speech and language therapy for children whose difficulties lie primarily within the pragmatic domain or which…

The relationships between phoneme categorisation, phonological processing, and reading performance were examined in Chinese-English speaking children in an English-speaking environment. Second language (L2, i.e., English) phonological processing but not phoneme categorisation was related to L2 reading. First language (L1) oral language skills were…

Hadi-Tabassum believes having a separate life context for each language she learned in childhood enabled her to switch easily among five different tongues. She states that the success of dual immersion bilingual programs is largely dependent on whether they immerse students in each of the involved languages separately and help students have a…