nstraints, phonotactic probabilityThe effects of phonotactic constraints (i.e., the status of a sound as correctly or incorrectly articulated) and phonotactic probability (i.e., the likelihood of a sound sequence) on lexical acquisition have been investigated independently. This study investigated the interactive influence of phonotactic…

Most, if not all, of the studies of subtypes of children with language impairments have been conducted with English-speaking children. The possibility and validity of identified subtypes for non-English clinical populations are, as yet, unknown. This study was designed to provide cross-linguistic evidence of language subtypes. A broad battery of…

The term lifelong, as applied to education or learning, has been in circulation for more than a quarter of a century. It has played an important role in policy discussions, as well as in studies of the sociology and economics of education. The relationship of this term to the rapidly changing world of information and educational technologies, and…

This descriptive study extends previous studies on communication repairs by (a) involving elementary-age children with autism who are prelinguistic to emergent one-word communicators and (b) examining repair strategies in terms of the relationships between the conventionality and functionality of communication forms and the type of breakdown.…

This research aims at promoting the usage of an online children's dictionary within a context of reading comprehension and vocabulary acquisition. Inspired by document retrieval approaches developed in the area of information retrieval (IR) research, we adapt a particular IR strategy, based on fuzzy logic, to a search in the electronic dictionary.…

Current controversy exists regarding the role of episodic representations in the formation of long-term semantic memories. Using the drug "midazolam" to induce temporary amnesia we tested participants' memories for newly learned facts in a semantic cue condition or an episodic and semantic cue condition. Following midazolam administration, memory…

For several languages, a preference for subject relative clauses over object relative clauses has been reported. However, Mak, Vonk, and Schriefers (2002) showed that there is no such preference for relative clauses with an animate subject and an inanimate object. A Dutch object relative clause as...de rots, die de wandelaars beklommen hebben...…

Stewart, Pickering, and Sanford (1998) reported a new type of semantic inference, implicit consequentiality, which they suggest is comparable to, although not directly related to, the well-documented phenomenon of implicit causality. It is our contention that there is a direct relation between these two semantic phenomena but that this relation…

Research in psychology and in linguistics has converged to suggest that the syntactic frames in which verbs appear carry meanings of their own, apart from the meaning of the verbs themselves. To date, however, a gap has existed between these two lines of research: Research in psychology has inferred the meanings of frames only indirectly; research…

A category effect (i.e., living vs. nonliving exemplars) in confrontation naming has been reported in association with various cerebral pathologies. However, the published reports conflict as to the presence of this category effect in normal controls. The present experiment included 90 subjects in three age groups (young, young-elderly, and…

An on-line ''word detection'' paradigm was used to assess the comprehension of thematic and transitive verb agreements during sentence processing in individuals diagnosed with probable Alzheimer's Disease (AD, n=15) and Frontotemporal Dementia (FTD, n=14). AD, FTD, and control participants (n=17) were asked to listen for a word in a sentence.…

Positron emission tomography was used to investigate two competing hypotheses about the role of the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) in word generation. One proposes a domain-specific organization, with neural activation dependent on the type of information being processed, i.e., surface sound structure or semantic. The other proposes a…

Although the issue of redefining the developmental education profession has been a constant in its history, the urgency to reexamine it has never been greater. As practice advances and changes, so must the language to describe it. A reexamination can be an opportunity to transform the work of the field, expand its borders, and redefine its…

This response to Al-Haj's article, "National Ethos, Multicultural Education, and the New History Textbooks in Israel" argues for three theses: (1) history textbooks and the public and academic debates about their objectivity, truth, and bias fulfill a semantic function for the adults of the society; (2) contradictory ethnic narratives…

When readers fail to relate to the cultural context of writers, gross misunderstanding results. When professional readers whose first language is English fail to enter the discourse of professional literary writers or authors who are bi- or multi-lingual and use English for literary creativity, blame is laid on the writers' 'poor' linguistic…