Reports a study showing that subjects can make discriminative judgments about a speaker's sex and race from his tape-recorded speech. Filtering the speech signal adversely affects race but not sex identification. Listener accuracy and confidence for sex judgments are greater than for race judgments. (PMJ)

Examines the innate faculties that underlie linguistic competence, especially syntactic competence, and proposes a theory of these faculties which accounts for the complexities of language and the evolution of human language. (AM)

Descriptive grammars based on sets of rewrite rules were constructed to summarize the structure and organization of 120 entries in a second grade student's journal of class news. These rules illuminated the relationship between experience, abstraction, and generation of structure, and the use of structure to express complex thoughts. (PMJ)

Reports three experiments investigating the relationship of the suffix effect and echoic memory. Shows that echoic memory persists for at least 20 seconds. Illustrates that echoic memory can be used to establish a more effective nonechoic memory. Shows that recency recall is higher to auditory than to visual items. (PMJ)

Demonstrates that the contextual probability of lexical items in a continuous sample of spontaneous speech, as measured by the predictability of words in context, is related to word frequency. (Author/RL)

Investigates the case of a 7-year-old boy with severe word-finding difficulties. The study used a series of theoretically motivated questions as a framework for psycholinguistic investigation to determine the cause of his difficulties. Findings indicated pervasive deficits in phonological processing, deficits interpreted as a developmental…

Attempts to determine whether or not explicit information given to second-language learners receiving processing instruction is responsible for the beneficial effects of instruction. Results indicate that these beneficial effects derived from the structured input activities and not from the explicit explanation provided to learners. (22…

Demonstrates how the definition of "simple attachment" and "tree lowering," operations related to the grammatical composition operations of "substitution" and "adjunction" in the Tree Adjoining Grammar formalism, yields a parser more constrained than previous description theory based models. The article…

Examined whether the characteristics in perception of speech sounds found in preverbal hearing infants might extend to the perception of signed language in infants with congenital deafness. Seventeen Japanese mother-infant dyads participated in the study. Found that infants with deafness showed greater attentional and affective responsiveness to…

Discusses and explains the conditions under which first language transfer occurs in terms of the connectionist framework of second language representation, processing, and acquisition. Identifies these conditions as interlingual mapping, markedness, language distance, learner characteristics, cognitive load and sociolinguistic context. (104…

Discusses issues related to natural language processing, including theoretical developments; natural language understanding; tools and techniques; natural language text processing systems; abstracting; information extraction; information retrieval; interfaces; software; Internet, Web, and digital library applications; machine translation for…

Expands on the authors' (1995) investigation of the parsing performance on "wh"-movement sentences by Chinese-speaking learners of English. The article compares the difficulty second-language learners have in parsing subject "wh"-traces in embedded finite and nonfinite clauses with the problems they have in parsing Garden Path…

Presents a fine-grained analysis of extensive empirical data on the automatization of explicitly learned rules of morphosyntax in a second language. Results indicate that the learning of morphosyntactic rules is highly skill-specific and that these skills develop gradually over time, adhering to the same power function learning curve as the…

Examines the CDI-WORDS Short Form vocabulary checklist as an index of language production. The study focuses on the associations between this short form and directly observed measures of lexical production; the associations between short-form checklists administered at different ages; the predictive associations between short form scores and…

Looks at the ways grammar and vocabulary are interconnected and suggests some implications for language teaching. Suggests that language teachers focus on word patterns to encourage four aspects of language learning: understanding, accuracy, fluency, and flexibility. (four references) (Author/CK)