Understanding how words are created is potentially a key component to being able to learn and understand new vocabulary words. However, research on morphological awareness is relatively rare. In this study, over 660 preschool-aged children from three language groups (Cantonese, Mandarin, and Korean speakers) in which compounding morphology is…

The present study investigated the perception and production of English /w/ and /v/ by native speakers of Sinhala, German, and Dutch, with the aim of examining how their native language phonetic processing affected the acquisition of these phonemes. Subjects performed a battery of tests that assessed their identification accuracy for natural…

This paper presents a brief summary of processability theory as proposed by [Pienemann, M., 1998a. "Language Processing and Second Language Development: Processability Theory." John Benjamins, Amsterdam; Pienemann, M., 1998b. "Developmental dynamics in L1 and L2 acquisition: processability theory and generative entrenchment." "Bilingualism:…

Background: Narratives have been used by a number of researchers to investigate the language of children with specific language impairment (SLI). While a number of explanations for SLI have been proposed, there is now mounting evidence that children with SLI have limited memory resources. Phonological memory has been the focus of the research on…

Studies have investigated and proposed different potential influences on children's initial mappings of object words to referents. Each proposal is a variant on the idea that children use one source of evidence about the structure of word meanings or of grammar to discover other forms of structure, and in doing so they "bootstrap" their…

An exploratory study probed the extent to which children rely on category membership to guide their inferences. A total of 60 children, 4 years of age, were shown 20 sets of pictures of various animals, plants, and minerals. Each set consisted of representations of three objects having two salient features: perceptual similarity/dissimilarity and…

Previous cognitive science research demonstrates how the Agent-action-Objective (AaO) paradigm controls the cognitive processes of differentiation and integration. The present discussion advances the process to the fourth of five phases. Of the four dependent variables emerging at this stage, two are discussed: zero processing and variations in…

Western philosophy has not had much to say about listening or receptive communication until fairly recently, and listening research has tended either to follow the trends of the speech communication field or to be directed by speech science or the pragmatics of the working world. A study examines the process of understanding and interpretation…

A study explored the degree to which people can capture the meaning of logical terms, using mental imagery. It was then hypothesized that: (1) subjects generally would fail to express logical relationships accurately, and (2) abstract images would be more difficult to capture than would concrete ones. Subjects, 25 college students, were asked to…

Intended to identify essential skills for academics and students as our society comes to depend increasingly on electronic text, and to decide how, when, and where these skills should be taught, this paper begins by discussing the tools of electronic information processing, i.e., telecommunications, computers, and software. A summary of the skills…

The development of a new grammar of English for machine translation systems at Weidner Communications Corporation is described. Although the project began with the intention of simply modifying the grammar rules already in use in the translation system, the reorganization of the grammar was deemed necessary for providing a principled manner of…

Two experiments investigated preschool children's use of the words "big" and "little" in three different ways (normative, perceptual, and functional) and in different contexts. The first experiment tested the sensitivity of 2-, 3-, and 4-year-olds to relational standards by asking them to judge an object's size in relation to…

An experiment is described that is designed to test for the operation of an input switch mechanism in bilinguals. Their ability to selectively avoid processing words presented in one of their languages while they are attending to words presented in their other language is described. The 20 subjects were all French-English bilinguals. The specific…

The meaning of children's lexical innovations is distinguished from the forms they rely on to convey meaning. Children require knowledge of the context in order to judge how the meaning of their innovation can be conveyed to the addressee. This contextualization is often achieved by default, since children tend to limit their early conversations…

Determines the relation between recallability and recognizability in experiments presenting a study list, then giving a recall test for some items followed by a recognition test for all items. The results suggested that the set of recallable items were substantially, if not wholly, included within the set of recognizable items. (Author/EJS)