Recent experiments in machine translation have given the semantic elements of collocation in Russian more objective criteria. Soviet linguists in search of semantic relationships have attempted to devise a semantic synthesis for construction of a basic language for machine translation. One such effort is summarized. (CHK)

Examines the acquisition of a reading vocabulary for abstract and concrete words in 62 second-grade children--words had been learned in basals or outside. Uses two tasks to examine concrete and abstract words. Finds that in neither task did concreteness influence reaction times, and abstract words were read with less accuracy than concrete words.…

Examined adults' intuitions about the distinction between what is said and what is implied by indicative utterances, such as "Jane has three children." Four experiments demonstrated that people assume that enriched pragmatics play a significant role in determining what is said and recognize a distinction between what is said and what is…

As one of the best known linguistic constraints on code switching, Poplack (1980) has proposed the "free morpheme constraint," which predicts no switching between free morphemes and bound morphemes. It is argued that this theory is not supported by linguistic data, and that semantic content, rather than morphology, must be considered. An…

Demonstrated how individual differences in semantic differential data can be modeled and assessed using three-mode models by studying the characterization of Chopin's "Preludes" by 38 Japanese college students. (SLD)

Discusses the rapid growth of the World Wide Web and the lack of use of electronic books and suggests that specialized contents and device independence can make Web-based books compete with print. Topics include enhancing the hypertext model of XML; client-side adaptation, including browsers and navigation; and semantic modeling. (Author/LRW)

Studies the relationship between decoding and comprehension in the oral and written modalities. Shows that poor decoders scored lower than average and good decoders on all comprehension tasks. Suggests a high degree of interdependence between listening comprehension, reading comprehension and decoding. Interprets results in favor of the…

Analysis of the French verb prefix "re-" finds its occurrence characterized not, strictly speaking, by meaning but by the variety of ways in which the verb itself and its prefixed form interact. Occurrences of "re-" are classified into five categories. Verbs not compatible with the prefix and several unusual cases are also discussed. (MSE)

Discusses whether the hypothesis, within Natural Semantic Metalanguage theory, that the conditional and counterfactual constructions are semantic universals is justifiable in the case of Japanese. It is concluded that there is an unambiguous equivalent of the "if"-construction in Japanese, and that while there is an unambiguous…

Examined whether context marked for grammatical gender can constrain the processing of homphone words in French. Homophones whose different meaning are associated with words of different genders were used in two cross-modal semantic priming experiments. (Author/VWL)

Reports results of an acquisition experiment with a group of Spanish-speaking children regarding their knowledge of a semantic restriction that prevents a referring expression from coreferring with a pronoun in certain syntactic configurations if its referent lacks consciousness. Sixteen children participated in a modified Truth-Value Judgment…

Explored the effects of two variables in the picture-word interference paradigm: semantic relatedness and the level of categorization of distracts relative to pictures' names. Results suggest that the effect of semantically related distractors depends on the level of categorization at which the response has to be given. Semantically unrelated…

Describes and illustrates several syntactic constraints on intrasentential pronoun reference, and provides operational examples of Paktus, a system that implements these constraints. An argument is made for the advantages of this system over another particular system that addresses roughly the same phenomena. (GLR)

An examination of German words for emotion, from the perspective of a cognitive theory of emotion, explores how the words, metaphors, affixes, and prefixes picture and value both negative and positive emotions. (CB)