This paper discusses the results of a study of 27 college students with deafness that investigated whether cognitive processes are modality dependent in individuals with deafness. The experiment included two separate parts, one composed of shape trials and the other composed of word trials. An initial stimulus was shown on a computer screen for…

A revisionist account of the development of ideas about semantics in modern theories of language is presented, focusing on the rift between Noam Chomsky and Generative Semanticists about the concept of deep structure, or the role of meaning in grammar. The discussion re-appraises the paradigm that has dominated American linguistics since the…

This brief survey of the field of psycholinguistics is intended for both students and anyone interested in language. It contains a summary overview of the main features of this area of language study: scope and principles of inquiry; basic concerns; and key concepts. Chapter topics include: language acquisition (first words, the birth of grammar,…

This brochure discusses, in lay terms, the degree to which language shapes thought. The first section describes briefly the questions that linguists have addressed in studying this issue, including how things such as location or time may be conceptualized differently in different language groups, offering examples from other languages in addition…

Five methods for studying the process of reading a text are presented, and a model for discourse processing is outlined. Discourse processing refers to comprehension of the meaning underlying the verbal message. The methods discussed here investigate the reading process as it occurs, and focus on the amount of time taken to complete a task or…

Concepts in cognitive psychology are applied to the language used in military situations, and a sentence classification system for use in analyzing military language is outlined. The system is designed to be used, in part, in conjunction with a natural language query system that allows a user to access a database. The discussion of military…

Memory research has recently moved from looking at performance in highly artificial laboratory tasks to examination of tasks in everyday life. One consequence is the development of the concept of "working memory." For the learner, foreign language comprehension makes great demands on working memory capacity. Comprehension of a message requires…

Professional training for translators, most often begun in specialized subject areas, should begin with a course in translation theory. The first purpose of such a course is to teach students to think as translators, whose function is to convey the message contained in the source language. Simply stated, this is a three-step process of: (1)…

Students arriving in the language department at Heriot-Watt University (Scotland) who study two languages arrive deficient in both languages and often in English as well. Generally, students have little knowledge of current and international affairs or the history and culture of the countries whose languages they are learning. However, they…

Automatic processing of word meaning by bilingual children was studied in a picture/word interference task. Thirty elementary and junior high students, fluent in French and English, named pictures as rapidly as possible while attempting to ignore distractor words printed inside the pictures' borders. The printed distractors interfered with naming…

Designed to determine a reader's ability in processing information relationships in written discourse in English, the extended-cloze instrument consists of six reading passages, each with four complete sentences deleted. Students read each passage and select the best of four multiple choice alternative sentences for each deletion. The instrument…

Productive errors in the Spanish of 3 Spanish-speaking children and 115 adults learning Spanish as a second language are analyzed. The errors are organized into three categories--lexical, morphological, and syntactic--and each category is further divided according to the type of cognitive error-processing strategy shown: simplification, reduction…

A comparison of measures of the attained writing proficiency of 45 college-level students of English as a second language is reported. Students were tested by two indirect measures, the Test of the Ability to Subordinate (TAS) and the Revision and Editing Test (RET), and their compositions were evaluated by a direct measure, holistic evaluation.…

Deals with the problem of transcoding, that is, when in switching from one sign system to another relations must be created between corresponding structures in the different systems. The mechanisms of transcoding are examined for spoken and written speech, numeral words and figures, and tone symbols and musical notes. (SCC)

A data-based study done in Philadelphia examined the constraints on relative pronoun deletion and looked for a possible correlation to social stratification or stylistic variation. Restrictive relative clauses only are examined. Constraints appear to be due to performance factors related to sentence processing. (SCC)