Describes the development of an information retrieval system designed for nonspecialist users that is based on the binary vector model. The syntactic structure of phrases used for indexing is examined, queries using an experimental collection of documents are described, and precision values are examined. (19 references) (LRW)

Investigates the claim that very young children avoid backwards coreference in their interpretation of sentences containing pronouns. It is argued that children initially prefer internal coreference even when such a response is disallowed for structural reasons and that avoidance appears to be a late developing phenomenon characteristic of…

Reports on the results of a descriptive study of the noun phrase agreement behavior exhibited by three first-year Spanish language students during a series of oral interviews conducted over six months (two academic quarters).(13 references) (JL)

Discusses ergative case marking system in Anatolian branch of Indo-European in which neuters inflect ergatively and common-gender nouns inflect accusatively. Development from instrumental to ergative that occurred in prehistory of Gorokan languages of Papua New Guinea is also discussed. It is suggested that this process is a general mechanism for…

Comparison of disfluent conversational utterances of 14 children who stutter and 14 children (mean age of both groups 52 months) who do not stutter found that for both groups, disfluency clusters were typically produced at clause onset and within the most complex linguistic contexts and that they reflect the effects of producing multiple syntactic…

The dequeismo phenomenon is occurring more frequently in spoken Spanish in both Spain and in Latin America. Introduction of the preposition "de" before "que" in nominal complements exploits one recourse in Spanish, namely the deictic capacity of prepositional "de" as a marker or introducer of the speaker's…

Three studies examined adults' generic noun phrases in English and Mandarin Chinese from child-directed speech of caregivers interacting with their toddlers. Found that generic noun phrases were reliably identified in both languages. Generic noun phrases most frequently referred to animals. Non-generic noun phrases were used most frequently for…

Discusses the advantages and disadvantages of what has become the standard approach to teaching relative clauses. To overcome the disadvantages, proposes a hierarchical teaching method that begins by introducing noun phrases that contain relative clauses before comparing them with similar structures in the learner's first language. Shows an…

A comprehensive phraseological study of Esperanto, based on detailed test analyses, participant observation and surveys, reveals both similarities and differences in comparison to ethnic or national languages. Relatively high level of metalinguistic consciousness and creativity were observed, coupled with widely differing attitudes towards the…

A fundamental problem for those interested in human communication is to determine how ideas and the various units of language structure are communicated through speaking. The physiological concepts involved in the control of muscle contraction and movement are theoretically distant from the processing levels and units postulated to exist in…

An essential part of the human capacity for language is the ability to link conceptual or semantic representations with syntactic representations. On the basis of data from spontaneous production, Tomasello (2000) suggested that young children acquire such links on a verb-by-verb basis, with little in the way of a general understanding of…

A variety of studies have reported that learners of English as a second language find subject relative clauses easier to produce and comprehend than direct object relatives, but it is unclear whether this preference should be attributed to structural factors or to a linear distance effect. This paper seeks to resolve this issue and to extend our…

Prepositional phrase attachment was investigated in temporarily ambiguous sentences. Both attachment site (noun phrase or verb phrase) and argument status (argument or adjunct) were manipulated to test the hypothesis that arguments are processed differently than adjuncts. Contrary to this hypothesis, some previous research suggested that arguments…

We conducted two word-by-word reading experiments to investigate the timing of implausibility detection for recipient and instrument prepositional phrases (PPs). These PPs differ in thematic role, relative frequency, and possibly in argument status. The results showed a difference in the timing of garden path effects such that the detection of…

The nature of working memory operation during complex sentence comprehension was studied by means of eye-tracking methodology. Readers had difficulty when the syntax of a sentence required them to hold 2 similar noun phrases (NPs) in working memory before syntactically and semantically integrating either of the NPs with a verb. In sentence …