Spontaneous interaction of three infants in conversational situations with a familiar adult at home were videotaped until the children were 2 years old, at 2- to 3-week intervals. Imitation was defined as children's utterances which maintained the order of adult utterances, were produced in the same tone, and which repeated at least one of the…

One way to understand the religion of Islam is to analyze the language and rhetoric of its users and listeners. A study examined the meaning behind the recitation of the 99 metaphorical names of Allah (God), translated from Arabic. Muslim rituals, of which this recitation is one, fulfill the basic principles of metaphors, which imply a framework…

Semiotics, the study of signs, is a relatively new and highly controversial area. Symbols, icons, and indexes represent the three types of signs. Semantics, pragmatics, and syntactics represent the three basic semiotic areas, with pragmatics having a growing influence in oral language and reading. A comprehensive view of curriculum is implicit in…

Recent linguistic research has focused on the actual uses or functions of language. Parallel to the development of discourse analysis, traditional language learning and teaching philosophies and methodologies have been supplemented or replaced by functional approaches, focusing on developing communicative competence, beyond strictly grammatical…

In response to problems in classifying grammaticality judgments in linguistic theory, a psychological model of speakers' performance on grammaticality judgment tasks is presented. The model departs significantly from notions of metalinguistic performance outlined in previous research, and is derived principally from recent work in category theory.…

It is proposed in this paper that there are two rules involved in Finnish vowel harmony--prescriptive and descriptive. The prescriptive rule requires a back vowel in the suffix whenever there is a back vowel in the root; the descriptive rule lets the value of the last non-neutral vowel spread to the suffix and additionally involves an analysis of…

A study examined whether the morphological structure of words--that is to say, the analysis of words into prefixes, stems, and suffixes--plays a role in how words are represented in an individual's internal lexicon. Ninety-five students from a large midwestern university identified stem words, matched for length and individual frequency, which…

A study examined 12 preschool children's early use of "who,""what," and "which" questions in spontaneous speech. Results indicated that children began to ask object questions before they asked subject questions, and acquired argument questions before adjunct questions. It was suggested that the two results could…

A case study of a 2-year-old progressing normally in speech development provides evidence of suprasegmental marking of the plural, thought to be adopted only in language-impaired children. Acoustic analyses of the durations and intensity of elicited words indicate that the child had adopted a suprasegmental strategy for marking the singular/plural…

The question of why language acquisition is not instantaneous is addressed in terms of two related issues: the logical and the developmental aspects of language acquisition. The role of linguistic theory and research in determining the interplay of these two aspects of grammatical development is examined. It is suggested that the…

Relationships between "combinatorial" abilities in language, symbolic play, blockbuilding, and non-semantic action sequences were explored in a study of 30 infants between 82 and 91 weeks of age. Subjects were observed in a laboratory playroom setting for approximately 45 minutes. During this time, a number of tasks were administered…

Three experiments used "rhyme priming," a methodology in which lexical decisions to a visually presented word are facilitated when the word is preceded by a rhyming word, to investigate the access and maintenance of speech-based codes in sentence comprehension. In these experiments, the pairs were visually dissimilar rhymes, such as…

Theoreticians have been asking for a long time what processes are involved in comprehension of figurative language, but psycholinguists have only recently addressed this question. One specific type of figurative expression, the metaphor, has been the focus of much recent research, in part because it promises to contribute much to the understanding…

Models of similarity have traditionally assumed that the similarity relation is symmetrical. However, when reversed, similarity statements frequently have different properties from those of the original. Previous attempts to account for the asymmetry of similarity have focused only on literal comparisons, resulting in a tendency to underestimate…

A very basic feature of learning is the translation of what is heard or seen into a form that can be sotred in memore. This process of translation will be considered in relation to reception and as a possible cause of differences in learning performance. (Author)