Deviances in early event-related potential (ERP) components reflecting auditory and phonological processing are well-documented in children at familial risk for dyslexia. However, little is known about brain responses which index processing in other linguistic domains such as lexicon, semantics and syntax in this group. The present study…

Sensitivity to prosodic cues might be used to constrain lexical search. Indeed, the prosodic organization of speech is such that words are invariably aligned with phrasal prosodic edges, providing a cue to segmentation. In this paper we devise an experimental paradigm that allows us to investigate the interaction between statistical and prosodic…

Evidence from 3 experiments reveals interference effects from structural relationships that are inconsistent with any grammatical parse of the perceived input. Processing disruption was observed when items occurring between a head and a dependent overlapped with either (or both) syntactic or semantic features of the dependent. Effects of syntactic…

In this article we compare five groups of learners acquiring Dutch gender as marked on determiners and adjectival inflection. Groups of L1 (first language) children and L1-SLI (first-language specific-language-impairment) children are compared to three Turkish-Dutch L2 (second language) groups: adult L2, child L2 and child L2-SLI. Overall, our…

This article describes a journey and a rediscovery of what it meant and means to speak from a Cree worldview. The way I was raised created my identity as a "nehiyaw" and to my having a Cree worldview; however, I lost these concepts when I started school and moved to the city. Later, in my adult years, I began re-learning my own history and…

The use of one body-part term in Turkish, corresponding to the English "head," is examined. It is demonstrated that this term is the most unmarked body-part term in the language with the largest functional load in common usage. It is found to have a large number of derivations, especially with socially deictic meanings. Possible…

Examines language in a factory. Results include the following: (1) within a building, different terms for the same thing may be found; (2) the major boundary is spatial, between types of work; and (3) operational links, proximity and mobility between departments are major determinants of agreement and difference in usage. (Author/RM)

Compares Chicano English and Anglo English speech in both linguistic and social terms. (CK)

Two experiments are reported to distinguish between the representation of sentences in immediate versus longer-term memory. It is indicated that the immediate representation is a verbatim image of the sentence but at delays there are both verbatim images and propositional representations. (Author/RM)

A study testing two theories about the processing of ambiguous sentences is reported. Results suggest that parallel processing and reciprocal interactions underlie the comprehension of ambiguous sentences. (RM)

Criticizes M. Halle's theory of morphology in word formation as too strong a generalization. (CK)

Recent psycholinguistic literature has developed differing interpretations of metaphoric sentences' comprehension. The inadequacies of the psycholinguistic theories of language processing which rest on the assumption according to which language is the expression of a relatively autonomous cognitive activity are highlighted in the interpretation of…

This study investigated the contributions of fundamental frequency, formant spacing, and glottal waveform to talker identification. The first two experiments focused on the effect of glottal waveform in the perception of talker identity. Subjects in the first experiment, 30 undergraduate students enrolled in an introductory psychology course,…

A study examined what trained phoneticians do when they are presented with a transcription task to carry out without any knowledge of the dialect they are listening to and without any explicit phonological theory as a point of departure. The "best" tokens of three categories of potential assimilation (full, partial, and zero alveolar)…

Much of the confusion surrounding the meaning and distribution of "(i)ci and la" and other partially cognate deictic terms in French can be dissipated if the terms are assumed to be related to the three grammatical persons: "(i)ci" is confined to the first person, "la" has taken over the second person, and…