Supplements Hans Basboll's state-of-the-art report on generative phonology (EJ 227 659), focusing on "abstract" v "concrete" approaches to surface data. Includes a summary of a discussion on phonology. (RL)

This study investigated whether misunderstanding of metaphor is attributable to inability to discover the ground, the demands of a particular form of metaphor, or surface aspects of metaphors. Results indicated task demands posed by predicative metaphors proved greater than those posed by topicless metaphors. (Author/DB)

Argues that discoveries concerning the essential properties of whole categories of word concepts are critical to essentialist intuitions. Reviews studies demonstrating that words and concepts are not used in accordance with essentialism, concluding that since essentialism is not vindicated by ordinary word use, it fails to undermine the cognitive…

Two studies used a comprehension task and an elicited production task to examine whether preschool children and adults appreciated the semantic properties of generic utterances. Findings indicated that in both tasks, 4-year-olds and adults treated generics ("bears live in caves") as distinct from both indefinites ("some") and universal quantifiers…

Discusses aphasia, the language deficit resulting from damage to the language centers of the brain, in order to evaluate how research on bilingual and polyglot aphasic individuals has contributed to our knowledge of the representation of language and languages in neurologically intact humans' brains. Examines the literature on treating lateral…

Trials an analysis of engineering reports using a modified version of Gosden's (1993) analysis of the science research article. Using Hallidayan sociolinguistic concepts, the analysis demonstrates how engineering writers linguistically convert real-world entities and processes into non-real-world concepts. The article also tracks authorial…

Responds to Ellis (2002), which suggests the statistical structure of the linguistic environment is a crucial and relatively neglected variable in language learning. This approach makes three assumptions about cognition and language learning that are not universally shared. Describes a distributed, instance-based approach that retains key features…

Two experiments investigated whether novel phonotactic regularities, not present in English, could be acquired by 16.5-month-olds from brief auditory experience. Subjects listened to consonant-vowel-consonant syllables in which particular consonants were artificially restricted to either initial or final position. Findings in a subsequent…

Investigated potential influences of general processing capacity and sustained selective attention on the temporal processing of a group of children with specific language impairment and a group of age-matched controls. Results suggest that the SLI children did not evidence a basic temporal processing deficit. (Author/VWL)

Mental representation of how a language works is basic to language use. Such questions as how the mental representation is developed, what is represented, and the role of the representation in individual language production are considered from the perspectives of linguistic and cognitive psychological theory and one model of cognition. (46…

Five groups of subjects (n=54, ages 15-43) were assigned a repair strategy to use after misperceiving a sentence through lipreading. Strategies included asking the talker to repeat a sentence, rephrasing it, simplifying it, saying an important keyword, and speaking two sentences. Compared to controls, subjects demonstrated significantly greater…

Explores factors affecting the ease or difficulty with which new words are learned in a second language, focusing on such intralexical factors as pronuncability, length, parts of speech, inflexional complexity, derivational complexity, semantic features, abstractedness, specificity, idomaticity, register restrictions, and multiple meaning. (52…

Describes a study that concluded that children generally treat the spatial locatives "in front of" and "behind" in a nondeictic way when a referent object with an obvious front is involved. Tasks that emphasized the viewpoint of the observer, however, caused a deictic response. (GLR)

Assesses whether 30 children aged three-five years had a preferred direction in responding to "when"-questions and whether this preference could be influenced by story structure. Results indicated that children showed a preference for "after"-type responses and that productions of "before" were more likely to be…

An investigation looks at complex English sentences that are used to represent two ordered events and containing "before" or "after" subordinate clauses. It is concluded that text evidence is directly relevant to an understanding of language processing. (25 references) (Author/VWL)