Explores the few studies that compare the psycholinguistic processes characterizing second language acquisition in the classroom and native-speaking environments. A description of a study that found that, although intermediate Spanish students extensively monitored language usage in both environments, their monitored knowledge was still quite…

Three studies of language comprehension skills compared 9- and 10-year-old learning-disabled children (LDC) with difficulty retaining verbal information (n=8) with LDC with normal memory spans (n=8) and normally achieving children (n=16). LDC did not have significant impairments in listening comprehension. However, LDC may experience difficulties…

Assessment of the English writing proficiency of 23 native French speaking students on 3 composition tasks found variance in the qualities of written texts and problem-solving behaviors. Writing expertise was found to affect discourse organization and content, writing complexity, heuristic strategies, and control strategies, while second-language…

Examined the use by children of the Novel Name-Nameless Category principle, under the framework that lexical principles are acquired in a developmental sequence. Results indicated that the particular principle was not available at the start of lexical acquisition but that exhaustive categorization ability and a vocabulary spurt occur…

Investigated children's understanding of meaning of the cognitive verb "know" (as defined by an abstractness and conceptual difficulty hierarchy). Found that knowledge increased with development, and low levels of meaning were mastered before high levels, and more rapidly. Understanding in audio-taped stories was more difficult than in video-taped…

Reviews recent literature concerning what to do to help foreign learners of Italian develop communicative competence, i.e., a functional knowledge of the uses of the language. This literature shows that to be conceptually fluent in a language is to know how that language encodes concepts on the basis of metaphorical reasoning. (33 references) (CK)

Presents the author's personal journey as a beginning therapist, the changes that have taken place in his personal and professional worldview as a result of conceptualizing therapy as a hermeneutic process. Concepts learned in approaching biblical studies have been applied in approaching family therapy. (LKS)

Two experiments investigated the focusing properties of thematic roles, and a third examined the view that thematic role preferences reflect a focusing on the consequences of the represented event. Results focus on the structure of represented events, top-down and bottom-up processes, thematic hierarchies and pronoun comprehension. (35 references)…

Argues that the syntactic and mental model accounts of the suppression effect in deductive reasoning are inadequate. Proposes a relative salience model. Describes a test of predictions from this model in a suppression model, which obtained evidence of convergent validity for the salience construct. Results could not be reconciled with either the…

Examined the relation between phonological memory and foreign language learning by analyzing the correlations between pseudoword repetition performance and English test performance among 41 Finnish primary school pupils. Results found significant correlations between pseudoword repetition and foreign language learning. (18 references) (MDM)

Presents a review of cognitive psychology research dealing with the organization and functioning of oral and written language production mechanisms. Discusses works dealing with the microstructural aspects of language, primarily oral production. Describes how the research perspective has evolved from modular to connectionist models. Examines the…

Responses of native and nonnative English speaking undergraduates regarding the grammaticality of sentences with varying object and subject structures demonstrated that native speakers exhibited a processing preference, as did nonnatives whose native language grammar did not bias them toward another certain structure. (19 references) (Author/CB)

Examined whether superior mathematics performance of students from Japan, Korea, and China may be due, in part, to differences in cognitive representation of number affected by Asian language features. Results suggested that the unique characteristics of the Asian number language system may facilitate the teaching and learning of mathematics,…

ALICE, a multimedia framework for intelligent computer-assisted language instruction (ICALI) at Carnegie Mellon University (PA), consists of a set of tools for building a number of different types of ICALI programs in any language. Its Natural Language Processing tools for syntactic error detection, morphological analysis, and generation of…

In two experiments, mothers told their infant and an adult a story that involved target words, and women taught an assembly procedure involving novel terminology to another adult. In speech to infants, mothers positioned focused words on pitch peaks, but in speech to adults, the emphasis was more variable. (BC)