Presents study focusing on creation of referential ties during comprehension and the effect of a text's global structure on this process. Results show that manipulations of distance between two referentially linked propositions and the structural height of the earlier proposition influence the ease with which comprehension occurs. (Author/BK)

Roger Brown, Diana Deutsch, Warren Benson, and Ruth Day comment on the similarities and differences between verbal language and music as forms of communication. This discussion occurred at the first session of the National Symposium on the Applications of Psychology to the Teaching and Learning of Music, Ann Arbor. (SJL)

Describes current activity in the Netherlands in the area of computational linguistics, mathematical linguistics, and text processing. (AM)

Critiques previous research concerning differences in voice onset time discrimination between Spanish and English infants and conclusions about the effect of early linguistic experience on speech perception. (RMH)

Argues that Aslin and Pisoni's criticisms are basically unwarranted on both methodological and conceptual grounds. (RMH)

Outlines an approach for studying auditory levels in speech perception, focusing on the artificial speech understanding system that is most compatible with the experimental data obtained in speech perception research. (RL)

Several samples of writing are used to illustrate the lamentable quality of writing in the business world today. The sentence structures of these samples are dissected and recombined to form functionally more suitable and literate sentences. (JN)

Examines Jean Piaget's theories on the laws of formal logic, and Johnson's claim that the law of noncontradiction is only descriptive of macroscopic objectives. Suggests Piaget and Johnson are wrong, since the possibility of saying anything significant and informative presupposes the law of noncontradiction is followed. (Author)

Discusses recent brain research as it pertains to reading instruction. (DD)

Indicates a difference between animate/inanimate subjects and objects in reversible sentences. Suggests that animatedness may be an important variable in children's early comprehension of speech, and that the traditional definition of reversibility should be modified to clarify the effects of probability and animatedness. (Author/RL)

The command-following behavior of holophrastic children was compared to that of telegraphic children. Four holoprastic and four telegraphic children learning English as a first language, and three holophrastic and the telegraphic children learning Spanish as a first language were tested. No significant differences were found among the four groups.…

The hypothesis that free recall involves the generation of candidate items followed by a decision process was tested in a situation which compared a standard recall test with a test that involved the overt generation and recognition of candidate items. (SW)

Establishes a significant correlation between the extent of Creole language interference and performance on a British reading comprehension test. Suggests that Creole affects the efficiency of understanding British English. (Author/RL)

Examined whether the preferences of verbs for appearing in particular subcategory structures can influence parsing and whether this influence is graded according to the strength of the preferences. Findings suggest that the verb subcategory preferences do produce a graded influence on the parse, according to their strength. (28 references)…

A study of 11 kindergarten and 11 second-grade students evaluated the effects of target word frequency and age on normally achieving children's performance of naming and phonological awareness tasks. Results supported an explicit connection between lexical retrieval and phonological awareness, mediated by working memory. (CR)