Discusses research in semantic processing and narrative discourse by psycholinguists, applied linguists, and speech pathologists. Focuses on children's comprehension of the language of instruction and contrasts normal and disordered comprehension and performance. Presents excerpts from two language evaluations that utilize some recent approaches…

Compares the processing of English words by Chinese-English bilinguals with that of monolingual English speakers. Subjects read and rated English words for their contribution to sentence structure and meaning. It was found that bilinguals generally rated English words as contributing more to sentence structure and meaning than did monolinguals.…

The apparent difficulty of students of French as a second language to acquire French vocabulary is examined, drawing on experience with teaching Irish university students and the structures and stylistic traits peculiar to French. It is noted that while certain kinds of words (noun, verb, adjective, adverb) occupy little space in text, they take…

Three- and four-year-old children were tested in their comprehension of locative prepositions. Results showed that those prepositions characterized as positive were comprehended less well than their ostensibly negative counterparts, contrary to theoretical predictions. An explanatory hypothesis concerning children's developing spatial…

Schuberth and Eimas (EJ 159 939) reported that context and frequency effects added to determine reaction times in a lexical decision (word v nonword) task. The present reexamination shows that context and frequency do interact, with semantic context facilitating the processing of low-frequency words more than high-frequency words. (Author/CP)

Investigated effects of first language processing on second language morphological awareness. Preliminary cross-linguistic comparisons indicated that morphological awareness in two typologically distinct languages, Chinese and English, differs in several major ways. Tested hypotheses from the study with two groups of English-as-a-Second-Language…

The present study employs event related potentials (ERPs) to verify the utility of using electrophysiological measures to study developmental questions within the field of language comprehension. Established ERP components (N400 and P600) that reflect semantic and syntactic processing were examined. Fifteen adults and 14 children (ages 8-13)…

The core idea that we argued for in the target article was that grammatical processing in a second language (L2) is fundamentally different from grammatical processing in one's native (first) language (L1). Our major source of evidence for this claim comes from experimental psycholinguistic studies investigating morphological and syntactic…

Possibilities of conceptual and pragmatic analysis exist for identifying epistemological processing in teacher thinking. These modes of organizing thought condition classroom planning, shape meaning from a virtual didactic knowledge-store, and scaffold further pedagogical interactions. The semio-cognitive grammar proposed is adapted to the…

A study investigated whether young children use sentence accent to mark new information as systematically as they have been shown to handle contrastive stress within naturally-occurring discourse. Data were drawn from the spontaneous conversations of a boy-and-girl twin pair with adults. The twins' speech was coded in carefully-defined categories…

A study investigated children's difficulty in learning color words and attempted to determine whether the difficulty was perceptual, conceptual, or linguistic. The subjects were 24 two-year-olds, half with knowledge of color words and half without, and a similar control group. The experimental subjects were given conceptual and comprehension tasks…

A study was conducted to test whether three, four, and five-year-old children would be better able to use either static or dynamic properties for grouping objects, and whether performance under these conditions would be better than when no property was given. One of the two study tasks, the free sort, also used by Rosch et al. (1976), asked…

The middle childhood years are a period of refinement of the semantics and syntax acquired in the early years, of substantial metalinguistic development, and of subtle changes in actual processing strategies. In a study undertaken to determine how these three factors interact, children aged 6 to 11 were asked to produce and recognize paraphrases.…

Compares the production of speech and sign: the approaches used in research, the cognitive processes involved, and the output timing mechanism. (AM)

Notes that in linguistic theory, phenomena previously handled by a separate grammatical component have been moved into the lexicon and that in some theories, the contrast between grammar and the lexicon has vanished. Concludes that the case for a modular distinction between grammar and the lexicon has been overstated and that the evidence to date…