Suggests that the role of phonology may be more limited when reading text in Japanese relative to English, and that this difference is not due to variations in orthographic depth. Proposes key factors are the greater visual discriminability of kanji words under degraded conditions and the less important role of word order as a syntactic cue. (SR)

Finds that explicit anaphors only reactivated undergraduate students' target antecedents when they are both lexically and conceptually identical to a target antecedent; but as distance between an anaphor and its antecedent increased, even an explicit anaphor did not reactivate a target antecedent. Shows that distant antecedents were reactivated…

Examines the effects of prosodic variation (vocal affect) on the type of inferences six- and nine-year-old children made about a speaker's communicative intent. Demonstrates that children's interpretations of potentially ironic utterances were influenced by prosody, and the nature of this influence differed by age. (SR)

Examined the influence of working memory on the off-line and real-time sentence comprehension/ processing of children with specific language impairment (SLI). Twelve children with SLI, 12 normally developing children matched for chronological age (CA), and 12 children matched for receptive syntax completed three tasks. Suggests that SLI children…

Presents results of four experiments that show that verbs have family size effect independently of nominal conversion alternants, that this effect is a strict type frequency effect and not a token frequency effect, that the effect is co-determined by the morphological structure of the inflected verb, and that it occurs irrespective of the…

Hebrew words are composed of two interwoven morphemes: a triconsonantal root and a word pattern. Two experiments examined the effect of the root morpheme on word identification by assessing parafoveal preview benefit effects. Although the information of the preview was not consciously perceived, preview of the root's letters facilitated both…

Reports two sets of lexical priming experiments in which the morphological, semantic, and orthographic relationships between primes and targets are varied in three SOA conditions. Results showed that morphological structure plays a significant role in early visual recognition of English words that is independent of both semantic and orthographic…

Demonstrates the willingness and ability of non-linguists to provide information about "what they know" about everyday speech activities in the form of their interpretive responses to various tape-recorded fragments of talk. Three types of information are identified from these responses, including overtly "available" information about a variety of…

Twenty-nine subjects enrolled in a fourth-semester Spanish course were assigned to one of two treatments, processing instruction and meaning-based output instruction. Results show that processing instruction has an overall greater effect than meaning-based output instruction on how learners interpret and produce the Spanish subjunctive of doubt.…

Examines differences in metalinguistic development between monolingual and bilingual children in terms of three subcategories: word awareness, syntactic awareness, and phonological awareness. In each case, some studies have reported advantages for bilingual children, while others have found either no difference between the groups or monolingual…

Reviews recent research that investigates second language performance from the perspective of sentence processing (on-line comprehension studies) and word recognition. Concentrates on describing methods that employ reaction time measures as correlates of processing difficulty or knowledge representation. (Author/VWL)

Examines the nature and development of fluent second language English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) word integration skills involved in lower-level text processing. Four theoretical approaches to word integration and sentence processing in the first language and second language ESL literature are discussed in conjunction with a review of the relevant…

Two studies are discussed. The first tested the effect of intervening material on the processing of subject-verb number agreement in Alzheimer's Disease patients and in normal elderly adults. The second examined the effect of intervening material on the processing of pronoun-antecedent number agreement in the same patients. (Author/VWL)

This study investigated whether 9-month-olds used phonotactic cues to segment words from fluent speech. Results suggested that 9-month-olds use probabilistic phonotactics to segment speech into words, and that high- probability between-word clusters are interpreted as both word onsets and word offsets. (Author/KB)

Discussion of information handling tools focuses on natural language processing and linguistically-based techniques that help improve retrieval performance. Topics include difficulties in information retrieval, including poor questions and ambiguous words; phrase detection; disambiguation; automatic categorization; entity extraction; concept…