Explains distributional regularity (DR), an intuition that sound sequences occurring frequently and in multiple contexts are candidates for the lexicon. Describes study that proposed hypotheses about children's segmenting sounds using DR functions, exploiting phonotactic constraints on pronunciation, and learning word-boundary clusters. Details…

A review of the concepts of short-term memory and working memory in contemporary cognitive psychology is applied to current research in language processing and language impairments. Unresolved theoretical issues are identified, including the role of speech production in short-term memory, the role of knowledge retrieval in short-term recall, the…

This article examines the construct of working memory and its relationship to sentence comprehension difficulties of children with specific language impairment. Some sentence comprehension problems of these children may be related to inefficient management of working memory resources. Techniques for assessing working memory and enhancing the…

Describes a new paradigm that may be appropriate for uncovering speech perceptual codes. Illusory words are detected by blending two dichotic stimuli. The paradigm's design allows for comparison of different speech units by the manipulation of the distribution of information between two inputs. (23 references) (Author/CK)

Examined digit and word dichotic listening in children in kindergarten and again one year later. Found that in the second digit test, between-ears performance difference decreased; overall performance increased. Between-ear differences across the two word tests were not significant, but overall performance improved over time. Age changes in the…

Discussion of Internet use for information searches on health-related topics focuses on a study that examined complexity and variability of natural language in using search terms that express the concept of electronic health (e-health). Highlights include precision of retrieved information; shift in terminology; and queries using the Pub Med…

Tests the typological plausibility of Processability Theory, a theory of processability of grammatical structures that formally predicts which structures can be processed by the learner at a given level of development. Tests the theory for two typologically different languages--Italian and Japanese (Author/VWL)

Clarifies Grosjean's Language Mode (LM) hypothesis, which develops the notion of language mode or the relative state of activation of a bilinguals two or more languages and language processing systems. Discusses studies that do not support views of the LM hypothesis. Studies of Dutch-English bilingual are presented. (Author/VWL)

Event-related potentials (EPRs) were employed to compare word category and verb inflection violations in Spanish. A similar frontal negativity was found between 250-400 ms for both violation types, suggesting that they equally disrupt initial syntactic analyses. These and other findings are discussed in detail. (VWL)

Provides an overview of recent advances in the study of the psychology of question answering, with particular emphasis on the ability to answer questions about coherent spoken and written messages. Examines the components of question answering, employing strategies, memory search, and comparison operations. (SR)

An examination of second-language acquisition research assumptions argues that second language data are important to understanding the nature of language. Exploration of theoretical underpinnings and empirical evidence relating to language universals indicates that research must consider how disparate facts of language are conceptually related…

States that Computer Assisted Language Instruction (CALI) software should be developed as an interactive natural language processing system. Describes artificial intelligence and proposes a model for intelligent CALI software (MICALI). Discusses MICALI's potential and current limitations due to the present state of the art. (Author/LS)

Explains the notion of "individual multilingualism." Multilingual behavior and multilingualism are considered as mental states, and questions about whether there are qualitative neuropsychological differences between multi- and mono-linguals are raised. Multilingualism in small children is briefly discussed. A reference list of 44 items is…

Summarizes role of language deficiencies in reading disability, focusing on two areas that appear critical to reading skill: language processing abilities and the awareness of phonological structure. Shows distinguishing characteristics of disabled readers to be consistent with theoretical and experimental findings about skilled reading, and to…

Describes DLT, the multilingual machine translation system that uses Esperanto as an intermediate language in which substantial portions of the translation subprocesses are carried out. The criteria for choosing an intermediate language and the reasons for preferring Esperanto over other languages are explained. (Author/DJD)