The syntagmatic paradigmatic model is a distributed, memory-based account of verbal processing. Built on a Bayesian interpretation of string edit theory, it characterizes the control of verbal cognition as the retrieval of sets of syntagmatic and paradigmatic constraints from sequential and relational long-term memory and the resolution of these…

Grammatical priming of picture naming was investigated in Kiswahili, which has a complex grammatical noun class system (a system like grammatical gender), with up to 15 noun classes that have obligatory agreements on adjectives, verbs, pronouns and other parts of speech. Participants heard a grammatically agreeing (concordant), nonagreeing…

Purpose: This study examined lexical-semantic organization of bilingual children in their 2 languages and in relation to monolingual age-mates. Method: Twelve Mandarin-English bilingual and 12 English monolingual children generated 3 associations to each of 36 words. Responses were coded as paradigmatic ("dog-cat") or syntagmatic ("dog-bark").…

A study investigated how two text-based factors, word relationships and surface syntactic structure, interact with readers' ability to analyze the semantic relationships and make inferences based on those analyses. In each passage, the influence of word relationships was assessed by manipulating the degree of semantic entailment between two words…

Recognizing a word in a meaningful text involves processes that combine information from many different sources, and both bottom-up processes (such as feature extraction and letter recognition) and top-down processes (contextual information) are thought to interact when skilled readers recognize words. Two similar experiments investigated word…

The work described in this paper was undertaken to study children's ability to preserve semantic relations during analogical mappings. Two experiments are described based on the understanding that metaphors and analogies are mappings from one semantic region (the domain of origin) to another (the range of application), which convey the idea that…

Language studies examining the language-thought relationship are important as are those that study other psychological factors concerned with the storage of knowledge. Since language is a product of the social process, it is important to consider that the meaning intended by the sender of the message (author) may not be the meaning decoded by the…

Two research areas, schema theory and linguistic theory, are described which have contributed to theories about language comprehension. Models of language comprehension conceptualized by Roger Schank, Carl Frederiksen, and Walter Kintsch are discussed in relation to the research and evaluated for practical use in reading instruction. (Author/PP)

Discusses the relative merits of feature versus model based semantics for the interpretation of verb phrases in English, French, and German. The article concludes that the simplicity afforded by features is offset by the depth of analysis achieved with event models that are additionally able to support a sophisticated approach to machine…

The functional architecture of the verbal processing resource system was studied by testing aphasic patients in Canada and Boston for their abilities to use syntactic structure in sentence comprehension in isolation and under dual-task conditions. Results indicate that the processing resource system underlying syntactic processing is separate from…

Considers problems of quantifying literary style. Examines several variables that may be used as stylistic "fingerprints" of a writer. Reviews work done on statistical analysis of change over time in literary style and applies this technique to the Bible. (CFR)

Proposes that an important role for connectionist research in language acquisition is analyzing what linguistic information is present in the child's input. Recent connectionist and statistical work analyzing the properties of real language corpora suggest a priori objections against the utility of distributional information are misguided. This…

As the first title in the new series, "New Directions in Communication Disorders Research: Integrative Approaches", this volume discusses a unique phenomenon in cognitive science, single-word reading, which is an essential element in successful reading competence. Single-word reading is an interdisciplinary area of research that incorporates…

Using a system based on standard augmented transition network (ATN) parsing approach, this report describes a technique for the rapid development of natural language parsing, called High-Level Grammar Specification Language (HGSL). The first part of the report describes the syntax and semantics of HGSL and the network implementation of each of its…

A specific skill necessary to expand vocabulary is that of acquiring additional meanings for words that have common, already known meanings. A study was conducted to determine if presenting subjects with the known meaning of a word before requiring them to learn a new meaning for it would result in a learning detriment. The study used homonyms…