If people believe that some property is true of all members of a class such as sofas, then they should also believe that the same property is true of all members of a conjunctively defined subset of that class such as uncomfortable handmade sofas. A series of experiments demonstrated a failure to observe this constraint, leading to what is termed…

Our purpose in this exploratory investigation was to examine the relationship between degree of impairment in grammatical morpheme comprehension and event-related potential measures of differentiated processing of speech syllables in 10 children with Down syndrome. Results strongly support the hypothesized association. Graphs of the association…

Word reading fluency, as indexed by the fast and accurate identification of single words, predicts both general reading ability and reading comprehension. This study compared the effects of context training and isolated word training on subsequent measures of word reading fluency. Good and poor readers were given 12 repetitions of two sets of…

Data from child language comprehension show that children make errors in interpreting pronouns as late as age 6;6 yet correctly comprehend reflexives from the age of 3;0. On the other hand, data from child language production show that children correctly produce both pronouns and reflexives from the age of 2 or 3. Current explanations of this…

We introduce a new method of sign language subtitling aimed at young deaf children who have not acquired reading skills yet, and can communicate only via signs. The method is based on: 1) the recently developed concept of "semantroid[TM]" (an animated 3D avatar limited to head and hands); 2) the design, development, and psychophysical evaluation…

We present the results from an experiment that tests the perception of English consonantal sequences by Korean speakers and we confirm that perceptual epenthesis in a second language (L2) arises from syllable structure restrictions of the first language (L1), rather than linear co-occurrence restrictions. Our study replicates and extends Dupoux,…

This paper reports on an empirical case study conducted to investigate the overall conditions and challenges of integrating corpus materials and corpus-based learning activities into English-language classes at a secondary school in Germany. Starting from the observation that in spite of the large amount of research into corpus-based language…

Objective: The effects of interference, competition, and distraction on cognitive processing are unclearly understood, particularly regarding type and intensity of auditory distraction across a variety of cognitive processing tasks. Method: The purpose of this investigation was to report two experiments that sought to explore the effects of types…

This study reports the results of a picture verification task assessing the interpretation of intra-sentential anaphora and cataphora in Italian by a group of English-Italian bilingual eight-year-olds, a group of age-matched Italian monolinguals, and a group of Italian monolingual adults. No significant differences between the groups were observed…

Background/Context: This study draws upon and contributes to sociocultural studies of literacy (a.k.a. New Literacy Studies), sociohistorical theories of identity formation, and practice theories of language interaction to argue that "becoming literate" requires critical inter- and intra-personal identity work accomplished through…

A variety of techniques for collecting and analyzing information about the natural use of natural languages is surveyed, emphasizing the importance of recognizing the properties of a research task that make a given technique more or less suitable to it rather than comparing techniques globally and ranking them absolutely. An initial goal is to…

It is argued that an area of linguistic research ripe for exploration is how the speaker actually makes use of linguistic knowledge in the production or reception of utterances. It is proposed that speech production is a lexically driven rather than semantically driven process and that the speaker's procedural competence is lexico-syntactic in…

Just as learning a first language is sometimes compared to existence within the relatively sheltered world of the Garden of Eden, the process of learning a second language is viewed as analogous to survival after expulsion from the Garden into a relatively harsh world, in which the learner must come to a conscious understanding of form and meaning…

One of a series of semi-annual reports, this publication contains 18 articles which report the status and progress of studies on the nature of speech, instruments for its investigation, and practical applications. Articles are as follows: "The Emergence of Native-Language Phonological Influences in Infants: A Perceptual Assimilation…

Stimuli used in research on the perception of the speech signal have often been obtained from simple filtering and distortion of the speech waveform, sometimes accompanied by noise. However, for more complex stimulus generation, the parameters of speech can be manipulated, after analysis and before synthesis, using various types of algorithms to…