Grosjean and Gee's prosodic structure theory is applied to second-language listening comprehension. It is argued that second-language students whose native language is syllable-timed do not have a mechanism to deal with unstressed syllables and must create one. The absences of this mechanism helps explain difficulties in listening comprehension.…

This paper examines several ways in which the morphological structure of words might enter their lexical representation or processing. It addresses possibilities such as representational economy, efficiency of processing, and module-external motivations. (55 references) (MDM)

Four experiments are presented in which adults learned to comprehend a new syntactic construction in their native language. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrate that adults quickly learn to comprehend the new construction and generalize it to new verbs. Experiment 3 shows that experience with the novel construction affects the processing of a…

Three experiments investigated whether speakers use constituent ordering as a mechanism for avoiding ambiguities. In utterances like ''Jane showed the letter to Mary to her mother,'' alternate orders would avoid the temporary PP-attachment ambiguity (''Jane showed her mother the letter to Mary,'' or ''Jane showed to her mother the letter to…

Two experiments examined the learning of form-meaning connections under conditions where the relevant forms were noticed but the critical aspects of meaning were not. Miniature noun class systems were employed, and the participants were told that the choice of determiner in noun phrases depended on whether the object was "near" or "far" from the…

The authors show that verb aspect influences the activation of event knowledge with 4 novel results. First, common locations of events (e.g., arena) are primed following verbs with imperfective aspect (e.g., was skating) but not verbs with perfect aspect (e.g., had skated). Second, people generate more locative prepositional phrases as…

The role of linguistic structure in a referential communication task was examined by comparing encoding and decoding performance of 80 five- and seven-year-old children from Japan and the United States. The linguist structure demanded by the task was the simultaneous encoding and decoding of attributes of size, color, pattern, and shape. (In…

To express object transfer, Cantonese-speakers use a "ditransitive" ([V-R-T] or [V-T-R] where V = Verb, T = Theme, R = Recipient), or a more complex prepositional/serial-verb (P/SV) construction. Clausal elements in Cantonese datives can be optional (resulting in "full" versus "non-full" forms) or appear in variant…

This research project was motivated by results of earlier work (Katzer et al., 1982) on the overlap among document representations. In the earlier study, one representation used in the INSPEC database proved to perform unexpectedly well in comparison with other commonly used representations, such as controlled vocabulary or free-text terms from…

This paper is the result of a study of ninety-two essays on three different topics by fifth-form pupils in the city of Ibadan. (Author)

The article describes particular structural aspects of German which are likely to cause difficulties for Polish-speaking learners. (Text is in German.) (DH)

Mel'nikov's structural and mathematical studies over twelve years are reviewed beginning with studies in automation in linguistic research. It is noted that Mal'nikov is not a pure structuralist because he considers historical, social, and psychological factors to be essential to language. Function, structure and substance are later combined in…

According to the author, most grammarians have been writing stratificational grammars without knowing it because they have dealt with units that are related to one another, but not simply as a whole to its parts, or as a class to its members. The question, then, is not whether a grammar is stratified but whether it is explicitly stratified. This…

Throughout the fifties and sixties the methodology of second-language teaching underwent a radical change in response to new communication needs, and under the influence of structural linguistics and behavioral psychology. Unfortunately, the effort did not produce all of the results expected, and this probably for two reasons: on the one hand, it…

The relevance, the application, and the importance of linguistics to teaching English as a foreign language is discussed. The author's assumption is that linguistics is "irrelevant to the aims, and inapplicable to the tasks of such teaching," and agrees with linguists such as Rosenbaum that the goal of linguistic science is "to determine…