Examines 158 examples of malapropisms and determines three possible sources of this type of error: (1) childhood errors that were never corrected, (2) other kinds of imperfect learning, and (3) breakdown in the storage and retrieval system of the mental lexicon. (AM)

Notes that traditional methods of teaching vocabulary development do not reflect the learning patterns of basic writing students. Suggests ways of modifying vocabulary instruction to help remedial students. (RL)

Two experiments showed the proportion of recalled words recognized to be higher than expected when the experiment was conducted under typical study conditions. Under special study conditions, the proportion of recalled words recognized more closely approximated expected values. Exceptions depend on encoding operations rather than on the properties…

Reports an experiment which supports the predictions of the accommodative-reconstruction hypothesis that recall is not based on retrieval of stored traces of interpreted experience. It involves accommodating details of what is to be remembered to what is known at the time of recall. (PMJ)

Suggests that cumulative dynamic analysis of the semantic structure of the incoming message is subconsciously performed by interpreters. (Author/RL)

Investigates the phenomenon that subjects speaking under exposure to masking noise demonstrate decreases in oral sensory function and temporal reorganization of the articulatory pattern. The study attempts to measure the effects of this phenomenon under varying durations of exposure to auditory masking. (Author/NCR)

An experiment with 100 German students of French showed that with the word "profond" the students' semantic associations were based on the mother tongue, whereas with the word "rapide" they were more oriented to the French syntax. Semantic problems are both linguistic and sociocultural in nature. (IFS/WGA)

Reviews studies that investigated the effects of emphatic stress on novel word learning by children with normal language and those with specific language impairments. The results indicate that use of emphatic stress on modeled target forms improved the children's lexical learning. Implications for language intervention are discussed. (Author/CR)

Outlines the stages of prosodic development that children follow from the beginning of word acquisition through the end of the second year of life. How these stages can be used to provide a model for treatment when working with children who display delayed phonological development is addressed. (Author/CR)

Three experiments examined preschoolers' and adults' understanding of distinctive semantic functions of adjectives and count nouns. Found that 4-year olds and adults, but not 3-year olds, who heard the adjective version (e.g., "a blue bird") were more likely than those who heard the count noun version ("a bluebird") to choose…

Natural language processing (NLP) is concerned with getting computers to do useful things with natural language. Major applications include machine translation, text generation, information retrieval, and natural language interfaces. Reviews important developments since 1987 that have led to advances in NLP; current NLP applications; and problems…

Examines recent trends in research in natural language processing and discusses some applications of this research to the solution of information management problems. The article emphasizes that the importance of natural language processing systems is reflected in their frequent use in support of other computer programs. (71 references) (CK)

Examines, through two studies, how prosodic information affects syntactic processing in locally ambiguous sentences. The first study dealt with people's judgments of the continuation of locally ambiguous sentence fragments of differing lengths. The second concerned ratings of normality of sentence types with differing contours. (27 references)…

Compared two-month old's abilities to detect changes in word order for sequences spoken as a well-formed sentence versus two unrelated, but well-formed, sentence fragments. Results suggest that infants are able to remember the order of spoken words when they are embedded within the coherent prosodic structure of a single well-formed sentence. (HTH)

Investigates the extent to which a representation of relative force can account for children's understanding of epistemic modals when their logical meaning is considered. Results confirm the influence of relative force and suggest that deductive inference is an early semantic component of modal terms. (29 references) (Author/CK)