Research supported by grants from the National Science Foundation. (DS)

Several aspects of the measurement and analysis of event-related brain potentials are explained in this introduction to a special issue, and some interpretation issues relevant for language studies are discussed. This article provides background for language researchers not familiar with the methodology. (Contains 42 references.) (Author/LB)

Investigates the influence of word meaning on lexical processing in children and adults. Examines developmental trends in lexical decisions for abstract and concrete words. Concludes that word meaning influences lexical processing in children but that there is a developmental shift in the kinds of semantic characteristics that are available for…

Responds to previous article suggesting that grammatical mode of communication arose via natural selection. Recent linguistic research is reviewed that demonstrates that grammar is discourse driven and that explanations for grammatical phenomena not only must come from outside the grammatical system but must come from principles governing the…

Describes a computational model of high-dimensional context space: the Hyperspace Analog to Language (HAL). Shows that HAL provides sufficient information to make semantic, grammatical, and abstract distinctions. Demonstrates the cognitive compatibility of the representations with human processing; and introduces a new methodology that extracts…

Offers an introduction to the theory and implementation of Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), a theory and method for extracting and representing the contextual-usage meaning of words by statistical computations applied to a large corpus of text. Gives an overview of applications and modeling of human knowledge to which LSA has been applied. (SR)

Comments on several quantitative approaches to semantic knowledge representations (the focus of this special issue). Points out some of the ways in which Latent Semantic Analysis and Hyperspace Analog to Language fall short of being plausible theories about psychological reality. Examines in-principle failures and wrong-kind failures that arise in…

In some psycholinguistic models, processing is characterized by generation of multiple outputs using information from higher processing levels. Such models are considered autonomous in word recognition domain but interactive in sentence processing domain. This confusion arises not from differences between lexical and syntactic processing, but from…

Five experiments support the argument that symmetry predication a is property of lexical items and has no special syntax; structural positioning of noun phrases in symmetricals-containing sentences sets their status as figure and ground or variant and referent, even for nonsensical nouns; and symmetrical predicate behavior varies as a function of…

The word length effect has been a central feature of theorising about immediate memory. The notion that short-term memory traces rapidly decay unless refreshed by rehearsal is based primarily upon the finding that serial recall for short words is better than that for long words. The decay account of the word length effect has come under pressure…

A major theoretical issue in the study of language processing and language acquisition is whether language development is independent of other aspects of cognitive development, encapsulated in a "language module." This issue is discussed as it relates to lexical processing. The paper begins with a historical contextualization of the modular view…

An initial description of the links between cognitive input, discourse rules, and the rules of sentence grammar is made, based on a technique developed for observing the translation of cognitive input into language in a spontaneous, practical speech event: descriptions of the lay-outs of apartments. (Author/RM)

In an experiment in which preschool children were asked questions such as "Which box is taller than it is fat?" the results were interpreted to mean that the linguistic strategy of attending to the first clause is more resistant to change than the preference for simply choosing the largest object. (Author/RM)