A model of information processing has been developed that combines concepts from the study of attention and the study of problem solving. The model has been realized as a computer program and used to simulate a variety of phenomena from the attention and performance literature. (Author/LMO)

Examines what is known about writing in both a first and a second language. Describes a study in which unskilled English as a second language writers in a "developmental" college writing course wrote an essay in class, compares the study's findings with the findings of some major studies of the writing process. (SED)

Describes a study which examines the relationship between context redundancy and keyword intelligibility in sentences having both high and low redundancy. Word pairs were placed in similar positions in two sets of sentences: sentence pairs that one might find in text, and adages together with sentences that might be spoken. (SED)

Describes a study of adult listeners' perceptions of infant babbling. Adult judges were unable to identify language background significantly above chance level. Findings do not support the babbling drift hypothesis which predicts that babbling begins to approximate characteristics of the mother tongue as infants approach meaningful speech. (SED)

Symbolic play and literate behavior involve similar mental processes: the production and comprehension of decontextualized language and narrative competence. Methodological and theoretical issues in recent studies are reviewed. Observational results support the theory of similar mental processes, but experimental results question a causal…

Describes three experiments that explored the informational roles of emphasis and word order in active sentences. The results, when considered together, strongly implicate recentness, but not emphasis, as an important means of linking temporally contiguous sentences. (HTH)

This article focuses on the language foundation for education. A brief overview of various linguistic theories as they relate to education are offered. The contrast between the functional, natural, self-generated, and contextually relevant characteristics of talk and writing are explored. (DF)

It is suggested that it is not between two languages that transfers and interference occur, but within the learner. The learner mediates and constructs this relationship according to acquisition operations, processes, strategies, and stages that contrastive analysis, despite its utility, can neither account for nor predict. (MSE)

Describes a study designed to identify the mental operations that contribute to people's ability to answer wh- questions, that is, questions which request information that plays a particular role in relation to some action or event. Wh- questions are signaled by interrogative pronouns and adverbs like who, what, when, and where. (SED)

Examines whether, after a single reading, the recall of text elements depends on the length of the passage. Results show more detail was remembered 23 hours later for short passages than for long. Concludes that negative effects of passage length on test performance were due in part to acquisition processes rather than retrieval. (EKN)

Considers two hypotheses about the association between equivalent words in a bilingual's two languages: (1) word association, which hypothesizes a direct association between words in the two languages and (2) concept mediation, which proposes the only connection between the two languages is via an underlying conceptual system. Reports on…

Examines whether specific characteristics of American Sign Language (ASL) syntax affect perceptual processing of the language. Findings support the psychological reality of sentence embedding processes in ASL, further supporting the claim that visually based languages achieve the same functional goals as speech, although with different means. (FL)

This research applied a cognitive model to identify item features that lead to irrelevant variance on the Test of Spoken English[TM] (TSE[R]). The TSE is an assessment of English oral proficiency and includes an item that elicits a description of a statistical graph. This item type sometimes appears to tap graph-reading skills--an irrelevant…

This study presents an empirical investigation of basic processes in the perception of speech sounds. The experimental methods applied have their roots in two different psycholinguistic research paradigms; i.e., "categorical perception" and "dichotic listening." In the categorical perception paradigm, listeners' categorization…

How children acquire language is a riddle for developmental linguists and the subject of debate among them. Some linguists argue that children acquire language through a universal process regardless of their native tongues. Evidence of the innateness of language capacity has also appeared in studies of deaf children. (Author/JN)