Provides a general analysis of the problem of relating private, cognitive mechanisms of individuals to their public behavior. A computational model of language acquisition is offered. Conclusions are related to Piaget's notion of mutual verification and to some general philosophical questions about learning. (Author/RH)

Compares sentence interpretation in American and Italian children between the ages of two and five. Results indicated that Italian children relied primarily on semantic cues, whereas American children relied on word order. (Author/CI)

Investigates the apparent correspondences for infinitival "to," and analyzes the basis for the common error of equating it with "a"--the mistaken identification of an English grammatical complementizer with a Spanish lexical preposition. (SL)

Research on the semantic differential technique has provided evidence for variance in Osgood's formulation of dimensions of connotative meaning. Retest data based on Piotrowski's original sample is reported. Results indicate support for stability and consistency of the Evaluation dimension. Moderate consistency was found in scales comprising the…

Findings suggest that semantic knowledge for concrete objects is represented and organized in similar ways in autistic, retarded, and normal children. Previous findings on cognitive deficits in autistic children are more likely related to their inability to use cognitive representations in an appropriate and flexible manner. (Author/RH)

Discusses several linguistic features at the phonological, morphological, structural, and semantic levels that should be investigated when applying comparative methodology to distant relationships. Advises caution in proposing proto-forms for distantly related languages, as they can obscure useful identification markers. (EKN)

Studies children from grades two, three, five, and seven who were required to generate or study exemplars of semantic categories (semantic orientation) or rhymes to stimulus words (phonetic orientation). Results demonstrate that the internal generation of stimulus material is a potent mnemonic device for children as young as seven years.…

Corrects errors in "A Developmental Study of Learning Disabilities and Memory" by Stephen J. Ceci (Volume 38, Number 2 1984), pages 352-371. (AS)

Semantic processing, the form of stories linking to-be-remembered words, was compared with cumulative rehearsal in a free-recall task for 60 educable mentally retarded adolescents. Semantic-processing Ss showed better recall at original learning and, to a lesser extent, at a 2-week retention test. (Author/CL)

This article explores the kinds of cues young children use as a basis for extending early works in an effort to label novel referent objects. Proposals that intend to explain how first words are extended and used to refer to objects or events for which no words explicitly exist are discussed. (DF)

A relatively common way to establish a new verb is to give verbal form to a noun, but it also exposes some irregularities of the language, and the rules that govern it. Although this is largely a phenomenon of the twentieth century, evidence of it appears in Rabelais' work. (MSE)

Contrasts two definitions of communication strategies: the interactional definition in which the central function is the negotiation of meaning, and the psycholinguistic definition in which communication strategies are related to individual language users' experience of communicative problems and the solutions they pursue. (EKN)

Reports on a study designed to show that Tulving's theory of encoding specificity and Bahrick's theory of associative continuity are not contradictory, rather complementary. (CLK)

A study of 34 third grade working class children of various ethnic backgrounds attempted to discover children's conceptions of ghosts. Children were exposed to information about ghosts and asked many "simple" and "wild" questions to elicit their conceptions. (MS)

PRECIS, The Preserved Context Index System, is explained in detail. (AP)