Paper shows that Wittgenstein, in discussing ostensive definition, understanding, and the private language argument, attacks Saint Augustine's notion of learning. Recently, the Augustinian conception has been resurrected in cognitive theories postulating an innate language of thought, making Wittgenstein's claims that this conception of learning…

Criticizes the computer modelling experiments conducted by Sokolik and Smith (1992), which involved the learning of French gender attribution using connectionist architecture. The article argues that the experiments greatly oversimplified the complexity of gender learning, in that they were designed in such a way that knowledge that must be…

A study based on monthly recordings of one bilingual child exposed to English and German suggests that, contrary to earlier research, the acquisition of sociolinguistic rules appears to precede the acquisition of structural rules. The assumption that linguistic sophistication is necessary for children to understand that they are exposed to two…

Compares the effects of language intervention over a one-year period on two groups of young children with delayed language: one group with cognitive skills markedly above their language level, and the other group with similar delays in cognitive and language skills. (28 references) (GLR)

Explores the development in children of dual-level phonological processing. The study suggests that even language-delayed six year olds form underlying representations composed of morphophonemic segments. Differences in performance between the groups studied (first graders, young adults, language-delayed first graders) are discussed. (55…

A review is offered of various bilingual memory studies that have been carried out during the past quarter century. Most of the studies have employed lexical items as the investigative tool, tested outside of a grammatical or semantic context. (Contains 58 references.) (JL)

Describes a connectionist model accounting for newborn infants' ability to finely discriminate almost all human speech contrasts and the fact that their phonemic category boundaries are identical, even for phonemes outside their target language. The model posits an innately guided learning in which an artificial neural network is stored in a…

Reports language acquisition experiments with simple recurrent networks solving phoneme prediction in continuous phonemic data, which suggests the network output could function as a source for syllable boundary detection. The phoneme prediction network simulates the necessary "bootstrap" to discover syllabic segmentation in unsegmented…

Describes language acquisition processes occurring in a community of interacting agents, in which coordination of joint attention leads to the development of structures, internal and external, that support organized behavior. It is argued that the simulation model demonstrates the plausibility of propositions arising from such processes, and that…

Three experiments investigated the developmental progression of reliance on object function versus object shape to extend novel words among 3- and 5-year olds and adults. Findings indicated that children focused on shape, whereas adults focused on function when extending novel words, suggesting a developmental change in the consideration of these…

In this study, we tested the predictions of 2 opposing perspectives on the nature of the deficit in specific language impairment (SLI): the domain-general, cognitive/perceptual processing view and the domain-specific, linguistic representational view. Data consisted of spontaneous speech samples from French-English bilingual children with SLI;…

In this paper, we reconsider some of the processes that distinguish production and comprehension. In particular, we discuss the specific forms of thinking involved in each: "thinking for speaking" and "thinking for listening" (Black and Chiat, 2000; Slobin, 1996). We argue that thinking for speaking (or for any form of language output) crucially…

Although interest in the language sciences was previously focused on newly created sentences, more recently much attention has turned to the importance of formulaic expressions in normal and disordered communication. Also referred to as formulaic expressions and made up of speech formulas, idioms, expletives, serial and memorized speech, slang,…

Clahsen and Felser's article (CF) is an important contribution to the field of psycholinguistics in several respects. First, it draws attention to the importance of a better understanding of the processing mechanisms utilized by child and adult language learners. Differences in these mechanisms may be responsible for the final outcome of the…

Two experiments investigated the acquisition of English comparative adjective forms, "Adj+er" and "more Adj." In Experiment 1, 72 children, four- and seven-years-old, indicated their preferences for the synthetic or periphrastic comparative form for 16 adjectives in a forced-choice judgement task; their responses were compared to those of a group…