Two studies examined 6- to 11-year-olds' gender-related interpretations of occupational titles. Findings indicated that children were sensitive to linguistic forms of job titles, and that these sensitivities differed in relation to participant variables such as attitude. Gender-specific interpretations occurred more frequently for marked…

Focuses on Elman's (1990) statistical analyses of the hidden unit activation patterns in his simple recurrent network on sentence prediction, first to highlight the feasibility of such analyses and then to show how connectionist explanations contribute to the development of effective explanatory theories. Argues for the evolutionary nature of…

Children's phonological processing abilities, reading skills, and vocabulary were assessed annually from kindergarten through grade four. Found that individual differences in phonological awareness were related to subsequent differences in word-level reading, and that individual differences in letter-name knowledge were related to subsequent…

Explores how children negotiated social identities through language used in spontaneous, casual conversation. Examines how audio transcripts of the childrens' conversations exhibit different aspects of their social "selves" and suggests that their talk can be analyzed in relation to the individual self, the immediately situated social actor, and…

Presents a model of high-dimensional context space, the Hyperspace Analogue to Language (HAL), with a series of simulations modelling human empirical results. Proposes that HAL's context space can be used to provide a basic categorization of semantic and grammatical concepts; model certain aspects of morphological ambiguity in verbs; and provide…

In three experiments, readers were presented with garden-path sentences containing reciprocal verbs, and their eye movements were monitored. Results demonstrate that information from the reciprocal verb influenced the earliest stages of syntactic processing. (29 references) (Author/CK)

Discusses challenges posed by reflexivity and the problem of unconsciousness. Argues that reflexivity demands scrutiny and articulation of the verbal, non-verbal and contextual components that define a particular research project. Presents examples of qualitative methods and the diverse approaches from which they proceed. (RJM)

Tested the predictions of three major hypotheses of relative clause acquisition in second language acquisition: the Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy (NPAH), the Perceptual Difficulty Hypothesis (PDH) and the SO Hierarchy Hypothesis (SOHH). Analyses of data collected from 61 learners of English as a Second Language in three different elicitation…

Presents a new extraction pattern, modified Document Type Definition (mDTD), which relies on analytical interpretation to identify extraction target from the contents of Web documents. Experiments with 330 Korean and 220 English Web documents on audio and video shopping sites yielded an average extraction precision of 91.3% for Korean and 81.9%…

Presents four sets of natural language processing-based exercises for which error correction and feedback are produced by means of a rich database in which linguistic information is encoded either at the lexical or the grammatical level. (Author/VWL)

Machine-Readable Dictionaries (MRD) and Machine Translation (MT) systems are important resources for query translation in Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR). Investigates use of MT systems and MRD to Arabic-English and English-Arabic CLIR. Translation ambiguity is the key problem. Presents three methods of query translation using a…

This introductory article discusses following articles that consider how phonology interacts with other aspects of language and language learning and the role of this interaction in language acquisition. It addresses the interaction between phonology and the lexicon, phonological representations and morphophonemic alternations, and the interaction…

Cross-linguistic investigation of the importance of syntactic cues and cue processing cost in French and Spanish four through six-year-olds' sentence comprehension revealed that topological cues helped French subjects most, while local cues helped Spanish subjects most. (Author/CB)

Identifies issues specific to syntactic parsing for intelligent computer-assisted language instruction (ICALI), including applications, types of input errors, characteristics of natural language, and output. Presents a general overview and assessment of grammar formalisms and parsing strategies in relation to ICALI. (Author/LS)

Reviews theory and research on the use and effectiveness of metaphors, analogies, and models as instructional tools. Concludes that the use of metaphors and other figurative devices promotes the acquisition of new knowledge. Suggests possible design and use of instructional metaphors. (FMW)