Explains distributional regularity (DR), an intuition that sound sequences occurring frequently and in multiple contexts are candidates for the lexicon. Describes study that proposed hypotheses about children's segmenting sounds using DR functions, exploiting phonotactic constraints on pronunciation, and learning word-boundary clusters. Details…

Examines the relationship between form and use of the reformulation sequence signalled by "c'est-a-dire" in written French and describes this sequence's various functions. The article attempts to show how a modular approach consisting of structural, semantic, pragmatic, and textual components contributes to a new and accurate description of…

Presents evidence that although patients with semantic deficits can sometimes show good performance on tests or object decisions, this pattern applies when nonsee-objects do not respect the regularities of the domain. Patients with semantic dementia viewed line drawings of a real and chimeric animals side-by-side and were asked to decide which was…

Investigates ways students engage in scientific reasoning practices through the formulation of written argument. Through textual analyses of university students' scientific writing, examined how general theoretical claims are tied to specific data in constructing evidence. (Author/VWL)

Two studies examined whether preschoolers use whole-part juxtaposition to accurately interpret novel part terms. Results confirmed that children do use juxtaposition to guide learning of novel part terms and that such use was not due to memory effects nor to recognition of the grammatical frame accompanying juxtaposition. Children readily used…

In this interview Professor Stuart Sutton discusses proliferation of metadata schemas as an outgrowth of various discourse communities as they find their niche on the semantic Web. Highlights include interoperability; cataloging tools, including GEMCat; and the role of librarians and information science education in the development of Internet…

Contrasts lay and "professional" metalinguistic knowledge from the viewpoint that linguistic issues concern all speakers of language. The article maintains that linguists firmly believe in a major difference between lay and theoretical metadiscursive remarks because linguists persist in believing in the objectivity of linguistic facts.…

Discusses access methods in hypermedia and information retrieval and describes a research project in which similarity measures have been extended to include imprecise matching over different dimensions of structured classification schemes. The semantic similarity of information units forms the basis for the automatic construction of links and is…

Discusses the growth in the availability of information on the Web in languages other than English and focuses on cross-lingual semantic interoperability. Describes the development of an automatic English/Chinese thesaurus and reports results of an experiment with legal information from the Hong Kong government, including precision and recall.…

Investigates the acquisition of the unaccusative-unergative distinction in second language Japanese by English learners. Aims to establish whether learners of Japanese are sensitive to the lexical-semantic characteristics of verbs in similar ways as learners of Romance languages who were found to follow the split intransitivity hierarchy.…

Sophomore (n=31) and senior (n=24) gerontology students completed the Aging Semantic Differential at the beginning of the semester and after conducting life-history interviews with older adults. Significant positive attitude changes resulted; the interviews were specifically cited as influencing changes. (Contains 33 references.) (SK)

Examines the semantic/pragmatic constraints on null objects spoken in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) in detail, and situates BP null objects in the broader crosslinguistic perspective of differential object marking. Demonstrates that semantic/pragmatic dimensions of animacy and specificity, and in particular their interaction, must be taken into…

Presents the results of a cross-linguistic study of the role of scope phenomena in untutored second language acquisition, or how adult learners in different source and target language settings acquire the means to express which part of an utterance is semantically affected by scope-bearing elements such scope particles or negation. (Author/VWL)

Examines the proposition that second language (L2) lexical forms are often mapped to the existing semantic content of their first language translations rather than to new semantic specifications of their own. Native and Nonnative English speakers were asked to perform two semantic judgment tasks in which they had to determine the degree of…

The study examined whether college students (35 normally achieving writers, 35 writers with learning disabilities, and 35 underprepared writers) differed in their ability to utilize the semantic roles and syntactic rules needed to apply cohesive referencing in written text. Among findings were that all groups made effective use of pronoun…