Analyzes research regarding children's acquisition and understanding of modal meaning. Results indicate that eight-year-olds have only a rudimentary system of modal meaning, and 12-year-olds' systems were not isomorphic with the adult system. (Author/CB)

Sentence comprehension and grammaticality judgment were studied in 10 healthy subjects and 10 agrammatic aphasic stroke patients. The latter were able to make grammaticality and comprehension judgments, but less accurately. Results indicated that such judgments are made using different processes and/or operate on different aspects of language…

Stating that the most pressing and puzzling scientific questions are questions about properties, not about change, the authors examine Piaget's and other theories of human development. Disputes the constructivist view that the initial cognitive state is one of emptiness, showing that from birth, humans react to certain stimuli in specific ways,…

Children with language disorders experience problems in three dimensions of semantics: (1) content of content (reference, referents, concepts); (2) form of content (structural units of meaning); (3) use of content (functional variation in meaning). Teacher intervention strategies in each area (e.g., for problems of reference, sentence meaning,…

Describes a specific class of indirectly conveyed meanings which are definitional, or partly definitional, that is, although conveyed by the utterances of sentences, they are not part of the meaning of those sentences. The study considers Strawson's topic-centered approach to presupposition, thematic predicates, and the pragmatics of…

Three experiments were designed to test preschool, first, and second graders' understanding of the term "word." A modified aural discrimination task required children to discriminate word from nonword stimuli. Results indicated that children's word concepts have been underestimated. (Author/BS)

The ability of computers to understand phrases and sentences has implications for future trends in counseling. Examples of computer-person interaction are given. (Author)

Highlights ways in which standard information processing models of language, and specifically of reading, are deficient. Deficiencies are considered under four headings: (1) theoretical rigour, (2) the interaction of different levels of information during reading; (3) the parallel nature of much of human information processing, and (4) reading…

The recognition of teaching as a special relationship among individuals is currently being overlooked in much contemporary educational research and policymaking. The author examines the philosophy of rationality in teaching and relates it to the educational vision presented in George Orwell's novel, "Nineteen Eighty-Four." (CB)

Explores the processing implications of bi-scriptalism. (EKN)

A study of individual patterns of usual and unusual phonological process occurrence in nine phonologically disordered children revealed that a small, basic subset of phonological processes accounted for the majority of errors made, with frequency the distinguishing characteristic among individuals. Unusual processes were primarily changes in word…

Discusses the effects on native speaker comprehension of familiarity with: (1) topic, (2) nonnative speech in general, (3) a nonnative accent in particular, and (4) a particular nonnative. Results indicate that the most important variable is familiarity with topic, although the others all have a facilitating effect in comprehension. (EKN)

For the whole of the last half-century, most theoretical syntacticians have assumed that knowledge of language is different from the tasks of speaking and understanding. There have been some dissenters, but, by and large, this view still holds sway. This book takes a different view: it continues the task set in hand by Kempson et al (2001) of…

This paper is an exploration of the conceptual issues that have arisen in the course of building a natural language generation (NLG) system for automatic test item generation. While natural language processing techniques are applicable to general verbal items, mathematics word problems are particularly tractable targets for natural language…

When preschool children think of objects as organized into collections (e.g., forest, army) they solve certain problems better than when they think of the same objects as organized into classes (e.g., trees, soldiers). Present studies indicate preschool children occasionally distort natural language inclusion hierarchies (e.g., oak, tree) into the…