Environmentally contaminated speech errors (irrelevant words or phrases derived from the speaker's environment and erroneously incorporated into speech) are hypothesized to occur at a high level of speech processing, but with a relatively late insertion point. The data indicate that speech production processes are not independent of other…

Examines the implications of connectionist models of cognition for second-language theory, in which all knowledge is embodied in a network of simple processing units joined by connections that are strengthened or weakened in response to regularities in input patterns. A connectionist framework is proposed within which hypotheses about…

Discusses the minimal requirements that any serious theory of language acquisition must meet, including the particular properties of the human language processor and linguistic and nonlinguistic input. A review of literature regarding the role of Universal Grammar in second-language acquisition suggests alternative theories to investigate for…

Three experiments gauging 7- to 10-year-old children's ability to interpret and comprehend figurative language indicated that informative contexts could improve subjects' abilities to perceive idiomatic meanings. Subjects were less able to produce idioms than to comprehend them, but were able to perceive that language can be both figurative and…

Examines language as a multimodal sensory enhancement system, integrating recent neuroanatomical and neurophysiological findings on the ontogenesis of neuronal structures with the generative concept of Universal Grammar for determination of fundamental differences between primary and secondary language acquisition. (Author/CB)

Examination of a profoundly deaf child's fingerspelling in more than 100 hours of interaction videotaped at intervals over six years revealed a gradual acquisition of the rules for fingerspelling and knowledge of the relation of fingerspelling to signs and to printed and spoken words. (Author/CB)

Examines the accuracy of quoted speech in newspapers, focusing on what people can remember verbatim and how that information relates to language processing, comprehension, and the mental representation of prose. Finds that memory for meaning was better than memory for verbatim prose, though memory for both was high. (MM)

Comparison of the performance of 25 deaf Italian adolescents and hearing controls on written grammatical tests found that the deaf subjects showed normal development in pluralization tasks, delayed development in pronoun tasks, and a qualitatively different pattern in an article task. (Author/CB)

Skills in the visual encoding of words were tested by comparing the performances of fourth-grade children with those of adults. In each experiment, adults responded more rapidly to the stimuli than did children. Using a masking procedure, the study determined that the variance in response times was caused by levels of motor skill development…

Children often confuse what is said and what is meant in referential communication. Five- and six-year olds were exposed as listeners or evaluators to a message in which they were either aware or not aware of the referent intended. Found that only six-year olds benefited from instructions to focus on the literal meaning of the message. (BC)

This article compares three models of morphological storage and processing: (1) the dual-processing model of Pinker, Marcus and others; (2) the connectionist model of Marchman, Plunkett, Seidenberg, and others; and (3) the network model of Bybee and Langacker. Type frequency of a morphological pattern is shown to be important in determining…

This study examined phonological processing in 30 less-skilled third-grade readers, 30 younger children at the same reading level, and 30 more-skilled age mates. The less-skilled readers had significantly lower accuracy scores than both age mates and younger normal readers on word span, word-pair repetition, tongue twister, and, especially,…

The development, use, and initial evaluation of a prototype computer system is described that enables nonspeaking persons with severe disabilities to engage in conversation on broad topics. Features include speech acts selected from a prestored menu and facilities for switching conversational perspectives between speaker and listener. (Contains 53…

Paper shows that Wittgenstein, in discussing ostensive definition, understanding, and the private language argument, attacks Saint Augustine's notion of learning. Recently, the Augustinian conception has been resurrected in cognitive theories postulating an innate language of thought, making Wittgenstein's claims that this conception of learning…

Two experiments investigated morphological decomposition in ambiguous novel compounds such as "busheater," which can be parsed as either "bus-heater" or "bush-heater." It was found that subjects' parsing choices for such words are influenced by orthographic constraints but that these constraints do not operate…