Describes a study that analyzes the naturalistic productions of "because" and "so" by 96 children, aged three-and-a-half to nine-and-a-half years of age, while narrating personal events. Analyzes results in terms of such factors as: correctness, types of causality, nature of actor/recipient, time of causality, producer, and linguistic issues. (SED)

Discusses experiments that investigated the sources of knowledge that are employed in spoken word identification. The interactive assumption that normal spoken word identification processes require the presence of semantic and syntactic context and the special status given to word-initial acoustic-phonetic information in cohort theory were…

Describes a study which examines the relationship between context redundancy and keyword intelligibility in sentences having both high and low redundancy. Word pairs were placed in similar positions in two sets of sentences: sentence pairs that one might find in text, and adages together with sentences that might be spoken. (SED)

Describes a study of adult listeners' perceptions of infant babbling. Adult judges were unable to identify language background significantly above chance level. Findings do not support the babbling drift hypothesis which predicts that babbling begins to approximate characteristics of the mother tongue as infants approach meaningful speech. (SED)

Describes three experiments that explored the informational roles of emphasis and word order in active sentences. The results, when considered together, strongly implicate recentness, but not emphasis, as an important means of linking temporally contiguous sentences. (HTH)

Examines whether, after a single reading, the recall of text elements depends on the length of the passage. Results show more detail was remembered 23 hours later for short passages than for long. Concludes that negative effects of passage length on test performance were due in part to acquisition processes rather than retrieval. (EKN)

Considers two hypotheses about the association between equivalent words in a bilingual's two languages: (1) word association, which hypothesizes a direct association between words in the two languages and (2) concept mediation, which proposes the only connection between the two languages is via an underlying conceptual system. Reports on…

Examines whether specific characteristics of American Sign Language (ASL) syntax affect perceptual processing of the language. Findings support the psychological reality of sentence embedding processes in ASL, further supporting the claim that visually based languages achieve the same functional goals as speech, although with different means. (FL)

This study presents an empirical investigation of basic processes in the perception of speech sounds. The experimental methods applied have their roots in two different psycholinguistic research paradigms; i.e., "categorical perception" and "dichotic listening." In the categorical perception paradigm, listeners' categorization…

Findings include (1) comprehension of 'this,''that,''here,' and 'there' depends on the role the comprehender plays in the conversation and (2) 'this' and 'here' are more difficult to comprehend that 'that' and 'there.' (EKN)

Investigates in an experimental setting the claim that young children have some knowledge of the rules of correspondence between language and reality which are central to propositional logic. (EKN)

Discusses experimental evidence which suggests that there may be greater right hemisphere involvement in language processing in bilinguals who acquire their second language late relative to their first language and in bilinguals who learn their second language in informal contexts. (EKN)

Examines the importance of context in the processing of negative statements and its influence on the latency components of negative sentences. In particular, tries to determine whether the longer reaction times to such sentences in experiments could be accounted for by their inappropriateness in the experimental settings. (Author/MES)

Research results indicated that children were able to use information from a number of sources in interpreting commands in which the relational terms were replaced by nonsense. Linguistic and nonlinguistic context and prior repetition presented constraints to children's responses. (Author/JB)

Summarizes recent empirical research in second language acquisition. Discusses relationship between age and second language learning, implications of invariant order of acquisition of morphemes obtained in various second language acquisition studies, and role of errors in second language acquisition. (Author/BK)