Research supported by a United States Public Health Grant to Edward E. Smith. (VM)

Presents an original description of the psychological processes involved in producing speech. (AM)

Reports on an experiment, performed on seven children, designed to show that children understand "here" and "there" with the self as reference point before they understand words such as these with reference to other speakers as reference points. (Author/AM)

Justification offered by Steven Pinker for his theory that thought is independent of language, and that thought is couched in some silent medium of the brain ("Mentalese"), is outlined step by step and critiqued. It is argued that the theory ignores deep technical issues and is not explanatory. (MSE)

Discusses the concept of metalinguistic awareness and describes the administration of the Test of Metalinguistic Ability (TAM) to 300 Italian elementary school children. (34 references) (CFM)

Examines societies in which varieties and degrees of literacy are possible or ordinary, such as Japan and Korea. Finds that these societies have separate but functionally interrelated writing systems, used for communicatively disparate purposes, differential mastery of which, consequently, has social and economic repercussions. Finds that…

Identifies three areas of research relevant to examining literacy acquisition in bilinguals, explains the contributions of each, and associates each with a skill required by monolingual and bilingual children in the development of literacy acquisition skills. (Author/VWL)

This article argues for the crucial role of alignment in second language acquisition, as conceptualized from a broadly sociocognitive perspective. By "alignment," we mean the complex processes through which human beings effect coordinated interaction, both with other human beings and (usually human-engineered) environments, situations,…

Despite the prevalence of bilingualism, language acquisition research has focused on monolingual infants. Monolinguals cannot learn minimally different words (e.g., "bih" and "dih") in a laboratory task until 17 months of age ( J. F. Werker, C. T. Fennell, K. M. Corcoran, & C. L. Stager, 2002). This study was extended to 14- to 20-month-old…

This study investigates if negotiation can affect syntacticization in the learning of second language (L2) syntax. Evidence from a number of studies has suggested that linguistic modification occurs during negotiation, but no research has examined if such modifications assist the learning of syntax in a second language. This study examined to what…

Reports on an experiment designed to study the role of letter stems in the identification of printed words. The stemmed letters b,d,g,h,l,p and t were used. Results showed that the suppression of the letter's body has more detrimental effects on identification than the suppression of the stem. (Author/RM)

Three experiments used "rhyme priming," a methodology in which lexical decisions to a visually presented word are facilitated when the word is preceded by a rhyming word, to investigate the access and maintenance of speech-based codes in sentence comprehension. In these experiments, the pairs were visually dissimilar rhymes, such as…

Individual differences in dichotic fusion experiments could be based on a number of different principles. The current working hypothesis suggests that the phenomenon reflects a language-binding effect; language-bound (LB) individuals perceive and remember events in language terms while language-optional (LO) individuals can use language structures…

In order to investigate the nature of metaphoric generation, comprehension, and appreciation, 8 different groups of 16 subjects were asked to rate each of 20 terms within each of 8 categories (United States historical figures, modern world leaders, mammals, birds, fish, airplanes, land vehicles, and ships) on 21 scales such as "warlike…