Assessed semantic priming for category coordinates and function-related words in children with good or poor reading comprehension, matched for decoding skill. Found that both groups showed priming for function-related words, but poor comprehenders showed priming for category coordinates only if the pairs shared high-association strength. Good…

Examines the use of shared semantics information to link concepts in an organizational memory to e-mail communications. Presents a framework for determining shared semantics based on organizational and personal user profiles. Illustrates how shared semantics are used by the HyperMail system to help link organizational memories (OM) content to…

Describes how German proverbs and idioms can be purposefully and efficiently incorporated into the German foreign-language classroom. Presents a holistic model with exercises on lexical approximations, semantic understanding, and pragmatic usage. Eighteen "vehicles" (chain reactions, association games) are introduced. (Author/VWL)

Examined the relationship between oral language and literacy in a two-year, multivariate design. Through empirical cluster analysis of a sample of 88 kindergarten children, four oral language subtypes were identified based on measures of semantics, syntax, metalinguistics, and oral narration. (Author/VWL)

Investigates native speakers' (NS) perceptions of coherence and comprehensibility of nonnative speakers' writing and talk that lacks or misuses grammatical cohesive devices. NS readers of NNS texts with missing cohesive devices assumed coherence and imposed coherence on the text by adding grammatical cohesive devices missing in the original,…

Presents a distributed connectionist model of the perception of spoken words, employing speech representation that combines lexical and abstract phonological information, with lexical access as a direct mapping on this distributed representation. The article examines the integration of partial cues to phonological identity, showing that the model…

Notes that prior assumptions that writing requires phonological mediation has been questioned due to the observation that on tasks requiring the production of spoken and written responses on the same naming attempt, some aphasic subjects produce different words. The data suggest that phonological and orthographic word forms can interact. (53…

The traditional view of the lexical system stipulates word-specific representations and separate pathways for regular and exception words, while an alternative approach views lexical knowledge as developing from general principles applied to mappings among distributed representations of written and spoken words and their meanings. In this study,…

Describes the use of TACT computer software to teach Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness." Employs TACT to reinforce understanding of the text achieved through a combination of analytic approaches to literary texts with linguistic methods. Argues that exposure to the software made students' interaction with the text more complex and…

Tracked the acquisition of 11 words over the course of a year for three adult learners with advanced proficiency in English. Four kinds of words were measured for knowledge: spelling, associations, grammatical information, and meaning. (Author/JL)

This article reviews competing theories of semantic organization in the brain, including modular models, unitary models, and the matrix theory, and provides supporting and refuting evidence for each, incorporating examples from the imaging literature. The literature does provide some support for distinct neural substrates that process specific…

Investigated degree to which two shape dimensions were represented categorically by children and adults when learning object names. Found that adults accepted names more often to objects that fell within proposed shape boundaries than to objects that crossed boundaries. Children were just as likely to generalize names to novel objects that fell…

Presents an account of existential "there"-sentences in which the postverbal negative phrase (NP) is required to represent a "hearer-new" entity. The article identifies five types of formally definite yet hearer-new NPs that may occur in "there"-sentences. The restriction against definite NPs in "there"-sentences results from a mismatch in…

Discussion of the use of Latent Semantic Indexing to determine relevancy in information retrieval focuses on statistical regression and Bayesian methods. Topics include keyword searching; a multiple regression model; how the regression model can aid search methods; and limitations of this approach, including complexity, linearity, and…

Discusses a number of issues involved in a description of a variety of English in relation to the distinctive vocabulary of Hong Kong English. Attention to semantic and pragmatic relationships internal to the variety and the sociocultural context in which it operates is urged. (Author/VWL)