Investigates the major theoretical question regarding the relative roles of logical and linguistic processes in development, as well as the specific outcomes of encoding and combining of logical connectives at different age levels with different contents and levels of practice. Subjects were 224 elementary, high school, and college students. (MP)

Reports two experiments which support the hypothesis that reaction time is faster to phonemes when the phonetic context matches the listener's expectation than when the vowel context is different. Reaction time to syllable targets is equal to phoneme, matched context targets. (PMJ)

Experiments were conducted to determine the effects of sentence contexts on word recognition and reading. The questions of whether context is predominantly facilitating or inhibiting and how automatic the influence of contexts is on word retrieval were investigated. (SW)

Presents a language processing model that distinguishes four functional components of reading and listening: feature detection, primary recognition, secondary recognition, and rehearsal and recoding. Uses the model to describe and incorporate some recent research. (GT)

Considers why basic writers write in "phrases patched upon phrases." Examines how language is patterned and acquired to clarify a framework for teaching basic writers. States that speaking and writing, two different ways of organizing and presenting information, have different structures. Explores what cognitive psychology can say about…

Examined large corpus of spontaneous English conversation for pronunciation of "the" and speech patterns immediately following. Found that speakers use "thiy" (versus "thuh") pronunciation to signal immediate suspension of speech to deal with a problem in production; problems were at many levels of production, including articulation, word…

Replies to Mellow's (1996) criticism of the authors' second language acquisition model. The article argues that this model is based on the psychological concept of exchange of linguistic information and that Mellow's evaluation of various types of transformational analysis is irrelevant. The article also addresses several points of detail in…

Assessed third-graders' phonological sensitivity, working memory, syntactic processing, word recognition, pseudoword reading, and reading comprehension. Found that phonological sensitivity was a strong predictor of reading performance after working memory and syntactic processing had been partialled out. Syntactic processing failed to predict word…

Reviews the eye-movement paradigm and refers to recent experiments applying the paradigm to issues of spoken word recognition (e.g., lexical competitor effects), syntactic processing, reference resolution, focus, as well as issues in cross-modality integration that are central to evaluating the modularity hypothesis. (Seven references) (Author/CK)

Notes that speech intelligibility has traditionally been measured by presenting words mixed in noise to listeners for identification at different signal-to-noise ratios. The words are produced in isolation or in sequence contexts where the predictability of specific items can be varied. Emphasizes that the technique provides valuable data about…

Contrasts English and Spanish passive voice patterns of the simple, continuous, and perfect tenses in order to find non-corresponding elements to predict difficulties in the acquisition of English and Spanish as a second language. Findings reveal a positive transfer between all the English and literal Spanish counterparts analyzed. (19 references)…

Explores how the discourse context of metaphorical language supports children's understanding of sociocultural norms. Classroom data are examined to determine how language, situation, and interaction assist in the interpretation of metaphorically used language. (46 references) (Author/CK)

Considers the relevance of the points raised in the preceding articles in this issue to the sociolinguistic development of children with speech and language impairments. Notes that such children often have low self-esteem and that their inability to negotiate an identity for themselves through discussion with their peers may contribute to this…

An auditory technique for studying semantic priming and lexical access, single-word shadowing, was applied in three separate experiments: priming in word pairs; priming in sentence context; and comparison of priming in children aged 7-11 and elderly adults. Results indicate that, because shadowing works across ages and does not require reading, it…

Discusses techniques for helping English-as-a-Foreign-Language students activate their prior knowledge for effective top-down processing to facilitate reading comprehension. Three activities are discussed: the use of a semantic map, questioning, and previewing. (Author/VWL)