A comparison of two well-known test formats for evaluating and characterizing foreign language learners' interlanguages revealed that open-ended production test questions were more difficult than closed-item recognition test questions. (CB)

Study of echoic memory interference among students in college introductory Spanish and German courses revealed that students with weaker listening comprehension skills depended more upon vulnerable sensory codes in echoic memory, while students with stronger comprehension relied on stable higher-order codes. (Author/CB)

The role of cognitive and linguistic individual differences as well as contextual factors and processing complexity were examined as determinants of pronoun reversal (I/you). It is proposed that pronoun reversals commonly result from a failure to perform a deicitic shift, which is especially likely when children's psycholinguistic processing…

A learning theory is described that addresses the learning of lexical entries for certain predicational terms. The functioning of the theory is exemplified through a discussion of the learning schema, with particular attention to varying lexicalization patterns. (Contains 56 references.) (Author/LB)

Argues that the teaching of grammar supplements learners' natural tendency to formulate and test hypotheses about the language. Complicated linguistic analyses can impede this process. Pedagogical grammar can be made less formal by keeping the analysis and metalanguage to the minimum. (36 references) (Author/CK)

Discusses two query evaluation strategies used in large text retrieval systems: (1) term-at-a-time; and (2) document-at-a-time. Describes optimization techniques that can reduce query evaluation costs. Presents simulation results that compare the performance of these optimization techniques when applied to natural language query evaluation. (JMV)

Studied 51 dyslexic children, 51 age-matched normal readers, and 27 younger normal readers to explore whether there are different subtypes of developmental dyslexia, and whether developmental dyslexia represents delay or deviance. Found evidence to support two subtypes: surface and phonological dyslexia. (DR)

A competition model experiment is reported that investigated the sentence-processing strategies of English-speaking learners of Japanese and Japanese-speaking learners of English. Results indicated a correlation between learners' proficiency in Japanese and case-marker dependency in Japanese strings. (Contains 23 references.) (Author/LB)

The processing strategies described by Clahsen to explain the development of German word order make predictions. Some experimental results show that inverted sentences result in significantly shorter response times than uninverted sentences for nonnative speakers but that native speakers do not respond at all to the inverted-uninverted contrast.…

Twelve community translators provided verbal accounts of their strategies while completing translations of a short leaflet from English into one of seven community languages. They adopted approaches wholly oriented to the needs of a specific ethnic minority groups in British society, resulting in a markedly sociocultural translation model.…

Presents an overview of the second Text Retrieval Conference (TREC-2), an opinion paper about the program, and nine papers by participants that show a range of techniques used in TREC. Topics include traditional text retrieval and information technology, efficiency, the use of language processing techniques, unusual approaches to text retrieval,…

Describes an information retrieval system in which advanced natural language processing is used to enhance the effectiveness of term-based document retrieval by preprocessing the documents; discovering interterm dependencies and build a conceptual hierarchy specific to database domain; and processing the user's natural language requests into…

Two experiments with French university students investigated whether the visual recognition of short prefixed and suffixed words was affected by their morphological structure. Results indicated that encoding times were sensitive to the lexical status of the unit, with a significant benefit occurring only when the subword unit corresponded to the…

Two experiments investigated the processing and representation of Dutch compound words as a function of their semantic transparency. The results provided clear evidence for the sensitivity of the lexical processing system to morphological complexity, independent of semantic transparency. (50 references) (MDM)

Summarizes the results of Finnish studies dealing with single-word experiments with aphasics as well as lexical decisions and eye-movement registration tests performed on normals. It then proposes a processing model for Finnish nouns, Stem Allomorph/Inflectional Decomposition (SAID), which predicts that both inflected and productive derived forms…