Current views on the acquisition of PRO can roughly be divided into two areas: lexical and syntactic accounts. We present data on one verb, "decide," that yields data that not only differs from the data for other similar verbs with the same children, but does not lend itself easily to either type of account. Data from a sentence elicitation task…

Three experiments were conducted to test the phonological recoding hypothesis in visual word recognition. Most studies on this issue have been conducted using mono-syllabic words, eventually constructing various models of phonological processing. Yet in many languages including English, the majority of words are multi-syllabic words. English…

This article argues that Firth and Wagner's 1997 contribution gained influence in second/foreign language teaching partly owing to a loose group of conceptual and ideological preconditions that drew on classroom methodologies, debates over educating second language teachers, and new views of how teachers could document and analyze their own…

This article argues for a reconceptualization of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research that would enlarge the ontological and empirical parameters of the field. We claim that methodologies, theories, and foci within SLA reflect an imbalance between cognitive and mentalistic orientations, and social and contextual orientations to language, the…

Firth and Wagner's (1997) call for a more socially and contextually situated view of second language acquisition (SLA) research has generated a great deal of discussion and debate, a summary of which is offered in this reflective commentary. Given the individualistic, cognitive origin of the SLA field, such controversy is entirely understandable.…

To examine the relationship between syntactic processes in language comprehension and language production, we compared structural persistence from sentence primes that speakers heard to persistence from primes that speakers produced. [Bock, J. K., & Griffin, Z. M. (2000). The persistence of structural priming: transient activation or implicit…

The domain of inquiry by literacy researchers has expanded greatly over the past generation. Literacy researchers now address out-of-school literacies, multimodal texts, literacy across the curriculum and other important issues. Research on literacy development has become even more important in the high stakes assessment environments in today's…

Several recent experiments indicate that, when learning words, children are not as sensitive to phonemic differences (e.g., /d/ vs. /t/) as they are in discrimination tasks [Pater, J., Stager, C. L., & Werker, J. F. (2004). "The perceptual acquisition of phonological contrasts." "Language," 80, 384-402; Stager, C. L., & Werker, J. F. (1997).…

An experiment is reported which was based on the use of judgments of perceived likelihood to study semantic constraints. Results of the experiment are discussed. (Author/RM)

A study is reported in which generic assertions, based on inductive and deductive evidence providing varying degrees of support, were presented to subjects for acceptance or rejection. The results show that generalization power (probability of generic agreement) is influenced primarily by inherent verb characteristics. (Author/RM)

Results of research to limit or expand identification of vowel frequency bands show that [i], [a], and [u] sounds are highly recognizable when filtered through a single frequency zone, but that other vowels under the same conditions are less easily recognized than those obtained by the direct channel. (Author/MSE)

Deals with monolingualism in foreign language teaching, taking up for consideration the work of Dodson ("Language Teaching and the Bilingual Method," London, Pitman, 1967) and his research. (Text is in German.) (IFS/WGA)

The nature and use of names are the focus of a resarch report published in a Canadian journal. The article presents the results of a study of college and university sports teams' nicknames, including major categories of names (human, animal world, mythical, etc.), and frequency of names. The report concludes with a discussion of the social…

An annotated listing of works, articles, parts of books and Ph.D. dissertations composed from approximately 1850 through early 1973 dealing with Anglicisms in Spanish. (PP)

Evidence is presented to support the claim that a semantic theory adequate to capture linguistic intuitions must provide semantic representations corresponding to all possible scope relationships and that an active sentence and the corresponding passive will receive different preferred interpretations. (Author/AM)