Presents a computational study of children's acquisition of word-to-meaning mappings, approximates this task as a mathematical problem, and presents an algorithm for solving the problem, illustrating the algorithm's operation on a small example. Notes that computational simulations demonstrated the robustness of the algorithm and illustrated how…

Five- through 9-year olds and adults heard ironic and literal criticisms and literal compliments. Found that comprehension of irony emerged between 5 and 6 years; and ratings of humor in irony increased with age but ratings of meanness in irony did not. (BC)

Discusses frequency effects in language acquisition. Provides an example of how frequency may relate to grammatical judgments of nonnative speakers acquisition of multiple wh-questions. (Author/VWL)

Responds to Ellis (2002), which focuses on frequency in language processing, language use, and language acquisition. Suggests his findings are consistent with those of second language acquisition researchers working with a variationist framework. Provides a brief overview of this research area and describes a psycholinguistic model of language…

Three studies are reported that addressed methodological problems in Stowe's (1989) study, which reported that semantic information eliminates garden paths in sentences with direct object versus subject ambiguity, such as in "Even before the police stopped the driver was frightened." Findings support a sentence processing system relying on…

Investigated the processes of lexical retrieval during the production of adjectival noun phrases. Argues that the existence of a frequency effect for the noun during noun phrase production restricts the various combinations of assumptions that speech production models can hold simultaneously. Possible implications of the additivity of the effects…

Explores "fast mapping," one of several processes that have been proposed to be involved in the rapid vocabulary expansion observed in the preschool years. An adaptation of a receptive word matching task examined how well children retained just-mapped relation between word and referent when some information was later missing. (Author/VWL)

Tested progressive assimilation violation in non-novel sequences using the palatal fricative [c]. Stimuli either violated fricative assimilation or did not. Violation also did not significantly inhibit spoken language processing. Results confirm that facilitation depends on the combination of progressive assimilation with novelty of the sequence.…

Describes the work by Silvio Ceccato regarding machine translation systems and procedures, exploring such aspects of his work as functional philosophical approaches to machine translation, notional spheres, correlational analysis, and type classifications. Ceccato envisioned many of the methods that are now being applied in machine translation…

Shares the literacy development of the author's son. Shows how the child used language for the following functions: instrumental, regulatory, interactional, personal, heuristic, imaginative, and representational. (MG)

Four word-learning studies exposed 2-year olds to novel verbs and nouns. Found that knowledge of what action or object was impending was not necessary for learning the words; children learned a novel verb for an intentional but not an accidental action; and children learned a novel noun for an object being sought, but not ones rejected while…

Two groups of children were tested at ages five, six, and seven to determine metalinguistic knowledge of the syntactic subject of a sentence. Found that five-year olds had difficulty repeating the pronomial and longest subjects; ability to isolate pronouns improved with age; and ability to identify longest subjects improved with increased…

The importance of phonology in assigning words to the correct grammatical category in language processing is discussed. Correlations between phonology and grammatical class are discussed. Experiments demonstrating that adults and children have learned these correlations are proposed and evaluated. (SLD)

Investigates the degree to which listeners are sensitive to the social relations expressed in choice of a name when referring to a third person during a conversation. Concludes that the social information inherent in names is picked up by readers and encoded into memory. (HB)

A cognitive systems approach of linguistic knowledge is outlined. According to this view, linguistic knowledge or cognitive grammar is part of the coherent structure and function of a cognitive system that is able to process language. (97 references) (JL)