Theoreticians have been asking for a long time what processes are involved in comprehension of figurative language, but psycholinguists have only recently addressed this question. One specific type of figurative expression, the metaphor, has been the focus of much recent research, in part because it promises to contribute much to the understanding…

The ACT theory of the learning of procedures is described. ACT is a computer simulation program that uses a propositional network to represent knowledge of general facts and a set of productions (condition action rules) to represent knowledge of procedures. There are currently four different mechanisms by which ACT can make additions and…

Although techniques of autosuggestion in personal development have a long history in some Eastern cultures, suggestibility as a character trait first came into focus in the West with the "animal magnetism" of Franz Mesmer. The uncovering of the nature and phenomena of hypnosis resulted in a steady and enduring interest in this state of…

These proceedings are a collection of papers by researchers in neurology, bilingualism, linguistics, and the neurolinguistics of bilingualism. Topics are addressed using neurolinguistic data for second language learning, learning models for second language acquisition, and implications for teaching and research. Summaries of the following papers…

An explanatory linguistic theory attempts to capture and explain the universal nature of human language, to choose among possible grammars of each human language, and to account for the linguistic constraints involved in language acquisition. Discourse theory, like linguistic theory, must be mentalistic in that it seeks to account for mental…

This paper draws on recent research findings in contending that starting with a student's "known" is a particularly sophisticated concept that, when understood both theoretically and practically, will permit teachers to help students read their texts with greater ease. It argues that students may have more prior knowledge about a topic…

The purpose of this analytical essay is to lay out some conceptual boundaries and distinctions about how children develop and use metacommunication (messages whose primary function is to make reference to or transform themselves or other messages). Two types of metacommunication are discussed: metalinguistic messages, in which there is a temporary…

This review of research into the acquisition of grammatical coordination (i.e., the use of conjunctions) pulls together both English language and cross-linguistic data. Although the importance of pragmatic factors in language acquisition is not denied, the data make it clear that grammatical factors seem to play a significant role in the…

A major concern in recent research is whether perceptual or functional information is of primary importance in children's early word meanings. In the study described here, artificial objects were used so that form and function could be independently manipulated. There were 57 subjects, ranging in age from 2.5 years to adulthood. The subjects were…

This paper discusses the nature of the relationship between grammar and pragmatics--specifically, between the rules of a language and the principles for using language. It argues that knowledge of language itself plays a small, primarily enabling part in people's ability to communicate effectively and that a large share of communicative competence…

Forty Swedish university students produced sentences from homographs that could be interpreted either as verbs or nouns. The words also varied in degree of polysemy (multiple meaning). The results indicated that the subjects prefered verb productions when the words were grouped according to objective frequency. This was more evident when the…

The human sentence parsing device assigns phrase structure to sentences in two steps. The first stage parser assigns lexical and phrasal nodes to substrings of words. The second stage parser then adds higher nodes to link these phrasal packages together into a complete phrase marker. This model is compared with others. (Author/RD)

The results of two experiments indicate that the two phonological properties of a word, its initial phoneme and length, strongly influence the latency to detect a target phoneme which begins the following word. Studies showing increased detection latencies following ambiguity are analyzed. (SW)

This study examines two views of lexical storage and word production, a derivational hypothesis and an independent unit hypothesis. Reaction times and errors were related to derivational complexity. A model of lexical retrieval process incorporating derivational processes is proposed. (Author/SW)

To show the organization of recall, items that are remembered together can be written on the same line of a two-dimensional (2D) grid. Such 2D recall does not induce the clustering it reveals. Various aspects of 2D recall and the clustering it reveals are discussed. (Author/RM)