A National Initiative has been formed to address the urgent need for the humanities and arts to gain a voice in the planning and development of the National Information Infrastructure (NII). This report makes a case for the importance of connecting all people with electronic access to the nation's cultural heritage, and relates the special…

A major theoretical issue in the study of language processing and language acquisition is whether language development is independent of other aspects of cognitive development, encapsulated in a "language module." This issue is discussed as it relates to lexical processing. The paper begins with a historical contextualization of the modular view…

Drawing from various current grammar systems, this text provides a practical and easy-to-understand handbook of grammar for readers of expository prose (language written for explanation and read for understanding). The analysis in the book is designed to perform two functions: (1) help readers receive with clarity, if at all possible, the…

A study employed computational and experimental methods to address a number of issues related to the representation and structural organization of spoken words in the mental lexicon. Using a computerized lexicon consisting of phonetic transcriptions of 20,000 words, "similarity neighborhoods" for each of the transcriptions were computed.…

Critical linguistics, an area of study within linguistics that has developed since the 1970s, is discussed. Critical linguistics argues that different groups, societies, and ideologies have different understandings of reality because they classify and categorize with and through language in different ways. Therefore, meaning is not something…

This study examined prior qualitative differences in the process of the emergence of verb use in two sisters when they were each 12 to 24 months of age (the older sister is 2 years and 9 months older than the younger sister). Daily diaries on both children were kept by the mother, who noted emergent structure and vocabulary. Systematic Analysis of…

Two studies investigated how flexible children are when asked to switch from one semantic interpretation to another. Three distinctly different standards for the adjectives "big" and "little" were examined: normative, perceptual, and functional. The first study looked at whether some standards are harder than others to represent and whether…

Two studies addressed the relative strengths of object kind bias and syntactic knowledge in 2-year-olds' inductions of word meaning. The study looked at children's interpretations of novel proper names for familiar and unfamiliar objects. In each study, 10 children were assigned to each of 2 conditions (familiar and unfamiliar) and shown 2 cats…

A study tested the validity of a theory of count/mass syntax in word learning. The theory proposes that children infer one of two procedures, depending on whether the referent is an object or a non-solid substance. Subjects were 36 2-year-olds, divided according to three experimental conditions. All were taught a novel word with reference to…

An ecological approach to a psychological study of language is presented in this paper. Such an approach is based on the understanding that the process of perceiving an object or event is based neither in images or pictures nor in verbal or symbolic structures. In order for objects and events to become knowable, higher order cognitive processes…

Translators must understand what they translate, but oral language is generally more redundant than written language and the translator need not repeat everything he hears. One method of teaching this skill is to have students sight translate a text in its entirety and then abridge it to its minimum informative content. Abstracting and compressing…

This report summarizes the work conducted for the Artificial Intelligence Measurement System (AIMS) Project which was undertaken as an exploration of methodology to consider how the effects of artificial intelligence systems could be compared to human performance. The research covered four areas of inquiry: (1) natural language processing and…

Designed to assess listeners' comprehension of ambiguous and polysemous utterances, this instrument is a series of 24 statements that include varying degrees and types of ambiguity. Subjects listen to prerecorded audio tapes of these statements, presented in a neutral tone that provides no stress or pitch cues to aid "disambiguation."…

The verbal organizing abilities of the bilingual, multilingual, and monolingual, as measured by four subscales of the Goyer Organization of Ideas Test (GOIT), were investigated. A total of 163 subjects from 5 universities having high populations of multilingual students were administered the GOIT. Bilinguals were not as effective on the sequential…

A text's meaning is, in part, independent of its form. Reading, most of the time, is taking meaning--not words--from the printed page, while proofreading requires attention to form rather than meaning. The author notes that: (1) a meaningful passage is easier to read than one with less meaning; (2) errors in oral reading usually do not obscure a…