Speech performance data, including hesitations in the stream of speech, fragmented words or phrases, retracings, and the use of intonation contours for noncommunicative purposes, are examined. It is proposed that these types of speech phenomena are indicative of underlying hypothesis testing and utterance planning strategies. Data produced by 48…

The cognitive processing strategies of two groups of French-English bilinguals were studied by means of an auditory Stroop test designed to evaluate cerebral hemispheric involvement. An "early bilingual" group were bilingual before the age of five, and a "late bilingual" group were bilingual after the age of ten. Stimuli were…

Studies analyzing children's response time to detect word targets revealed that six-year-olds and younger children generally did not show the response time advantage for accented target words which adult listeners show, providing support for the argument that the processing advantage for accented words reflects the semantic role of accent as an…

Both writers and readers experience auditory imagery of intonations, accents, and hesitations in written language, and some aspects of this "written language prosody" are made partially overt through punctuation. Two studies explored the relationship between written language prosody and punctuation. The first study asked people to read…

Parsing sentences into meaningful phrases and clauses is an essential step in language comprehension, and parsing difficulty is a common reading problem. Prosody (intonation, stress, and rhythm) provides information about phrase and clause boundaries in spoken language that is not available in written language. In an experiment to test whether…

The proceedings include the following papers: "Why We Study Child Language"; "Children's Use of Information in Word Learning"; "An Examination of the Initial Mapping of Verb Meanings"; "Evidence for the VP Constituent from Child Korean"; "The Role of Stress, Position, and Intonation in the…

A study explored the use of a text-copying task for the determination of syntactic constituent structure. It was predicted that the task would be a naturalistic, reasonably direct, and sensitive psycholinguistic research method. In two experiments, 70 subjects wrote out copies of typed passages. The points where they paused and looked back to the…

The goal of this study is to discover the phonetic difficulties encountered in the acquisition of French as a second language by English-speaking children. The children are studying French in a total immersion situation without benefit of structural exercises or special French language laboratory classes. Of particular interest here is the extent…

The collection of papers on linguistic experiments includes: "Discourse Functions of Pitch Range in Spontaneous and Read Speech" (Gayle M. Ayers); "When Is a Syllable Not a Syllable?" (Mary E. Beckman); "The Relationship between Syntactic and Semantic Processes in Sentence Comprehension" (Julie E. Boland); "The Influence of Orthography and…

Papers in phonology, psycholinguistics, and syntax include: "Discriminating between Syntactic and Semantic Processing: Evidence from Event-Related Potentials" (Kim Ainsworth-Darnell); "The Syntactic Structure of Chinese Formal Focus" (Qian Gao); "Employing a Multimodal Logic in an Approach to German Pronoun Fronting"…

This paper examines certain of the cues to surface constituency that are salient to children in the comprehension of syntactic structure. Accessibility is studied through a set of experiments requiring seven-year-old children to repeat certain syntactic constituents. These children can correctly identify subjects and also predicate phrases with…

Research reports included in this volume of working papers in linguistics are: "Perception of Consonant Clusters and Variable Gap Time" (Mike Cahill); "Near-Merger in Russian Palatalization" (Erin Diehm, Keith Johnson); "Breadth of Focus, Modality, and Prominence Perception in Neapolitan Italian" (Mariapaola…

Reports of research in phonetics and psycholinguistics include: "Interaction with Autonomy: Defining Multiple Output Models in Psycholinguistic Theories" (Julie E. Boland, Anne Cutler); "Vocal Tract Evolution and Vowel Production" (K. Bretonnel Cohen); "Final Lowering in Kipare" (Rebecca Herman); "Gestural…

Investigates the relationship between age of arrival in the second-language environment and a preference for prosodic versus syntactic cues to sentence interpretation in English. The study found that older English-as-a-Second-Language learners were just as likely as the younger ones to attend to prosody rather than syntax. (43 references)…

Papers presented at a 1977 symposium on language acquisition held at the University of Wisconsin/Milwaukee are included. Contents are as follows: "Assumptions, Methods and Goals in Language Acquisition Research" (Sheldon); "The Mother as LAD: Interaction between Order and Frequency of Parental Input and Child Production"…