Preschoolers learned a novel adjective or count noun for an object and chose between two objects that shared an object kind or a material kind property with the target object. Found that, in interpreting adjectives, four-year-olds were more likely to choose the object sharing material kind with the target if the target was familiar than if it was…

Examines the role of context effects in the processing of homophones in Chinese and Chinese-English bilingual speech. Finds that prior sentence context has an early effect on the disambiguation of various homophone meanings in both monolingual and bilingual situations. Accounts for results by interactive activation models of lexical processing.…

Investigates the relationship of specific semantic and syntactic text characteristics to what information readers recall. Confirms that readers are more likely to recall more versus less important information and information in clauses, independent clauses, and first paragraphs. Suggests how writers can use these findings to help readers retain…

Two intra-modal immediate repetition priming experiments ask whether speech inputs can link directly to abstract underlying representations, or whether access is mediated via intervening "access representations" of each word's surface phonetic form. (Author/VWL)

Offers an overview of contrasts and similarities in various approaches to Shakespeare studies. Discusses how a shift in perspectives from grappling with tragic moral themes to examining aesthetic and semantic complexity represents a productive way to respond to Shakespeare. (NH)

Using a word order correction paradigm, this study assessed syntactic awareness skills in children with good and poor reading comprehension, matched for age, decoding skill, and nonverbal ability. Poor comprehenders performed less well than normal readers, and the performance of both groups was influenced by the syntactic complexity and semantic…

Explores similarities or dissimilarities between citation-semantic and analytic indexing based on a study of records in the Science Citation Index and MEDLINE databases on antibiotic resistance in pneumonia. Concludes that disparate indexing terms may be an advantage for better recall and precision in information retrieval. (Contains 42…

Discusses changes in the location and provision of information services that have resulted from online technologies, particularly the World Wide Web. Highlights include knowledge management in digital libraries; the importance of research on information technology and digital libraries; semantic indexes; concept switching; information analysis;…

Examines research on learning related vocabulary, such as lexical sets, a unit of vocabulary or specific items sharing certain formal or semantic features. This research shows that learning related words at the same time makes learning them more difficult and suggests that this difficulty can be avoided if related words are learned separately.…

Reports two sets of lexical priming experiments in which the morphological, semantic, and orthographic relationships between primes and targets are varied in three SOA conditions. Results showed that morphological structure plays a significant role in early visual recognition of English words that is independent of both semantic and orthographic…

Discusses the nature of information measuring its distance from the perfect theory or from the right answer to the information seeking question that led to it. The measures here are provided by the Tichy-Hilpinen-Oddie-Niiniluoto-likeness measures introduced in the context of the philosophical problem of verisimilitude. (JAK)

Presents an approach for dynamic database integration and query processing in the absence of information about attribute correspondences and global IDs. Defines different types of equivalence conditions for the construction of global IDs. Proposes a strategy based on ranked role-sets that makes use of an automated semantic integration procedure…

Rejects the "etymological fallacy" theory, which seeks to minimize the role of etymology in the study of semantics, arguing that etymology represents a perfectly coherent philosophy of language, given that linguistic change is a legitimate source of anxiety for any culture founded on laws or sacred texts, whether oral or written. (MSE)

Examined an aspect of modality in the Spanish spoken in the Houston, Texas community. Demonstrates that semantic-pragmatic variation and change are taking place and affecting the forms of "deber (de) and "tener que" in their deontic and epistemic modes. Interviewed Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in Spanish. Analyses show an…

Analyzes features of the Swedish language from the viewpoint of mono-and cross-language information retrieval. Results of a comparative study that tested the degree of lexical ambiguity in Swedish, Finnish, and English suggest that part-of-speech tagging might be useful in Swedish information retrieval due to the high frequency of homographic…