Two experiments were conducted to examine the on-line processing mechanisms used by young children to comprehend pronouns. The work focuses on their use of two highly relevant sources of information: (1) the gender and number features carried by English pronouns, and (2) the differing accessibility of discourse entities, as influenced by…

The 10th International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM 2017) is held under the auspices of the International Educational Data Mining Society at the Optics Velley Kingdom Plaza Hotel, Wuhan, Hubei Province, in China. This years conference features two invited talks by: Dr. Jie Tang, Associate Professor with the Department of Computer…

A study employed computational and experimental methods to address a number of issues related to the representation and structural organization of spoken words in the mental lexicon. Using a computerized lexicon consisting of phonetic transcriptions of 20,000 words, "similarity neighborhoods" for each of the transcriptions were computed.…

The "property-set model" is proposed for concept learning and subsequent recognition and classification of old and new exemplars. In an experimental evaluation of alternative models, the property-set model was the best predictor of both recognition and classification performance. (Author/RM)

Discusses prevailing ideas of how children learn language and addresses the argument of rules versus analogies in learning to form the past tense of verbs. Cites cases involving connectionist models. (ML)

Two experiments tested the limiting case of a multiple resources approach to resource allocation in information processing. Results contradict a single-capacity model, supporting the idea that the hemispheres' resource supplies are independent and have implications for both cerebral specialization and divided attention issues. (Author/PN)

Presents a computer simulation testing semantic networks and spreading activation models of human memory. Describes how a sentence is encoded by building a working memory structure from its words and from semantic memory concepts related to its meaning. Retrieval processes use cue words or sentences to locate working memory structures. (Author/MES)

A model of the structure of complex words based on an organization of the internal lexicon by shared-meaning content is proposed. Results of traditional linguistic experiments testing the hypothesis show that meaning content is a more salient basis for judgments of similarity and difference than is meaning structure. (PMJ)

Describes the cross-modal semantic priming paradigm, including its underlying rationale and the different tasks with which it is combined. Introduces the type of stimuli used and the dependent and independent variables typically manipulated; discusses the paradigm's main advantages and drawbacks; and considers its most important areas of…

Reviews phoneme monitoring studies from 1969 to 1996 and groups them in terms of issues addressed with the task, including the contribution of the lexicon to speech perception, processing complexity, attention, contribution of prosodic information, and the basic unit of speech perception. Identifies and highlights task demands and artifactual…

Explores the interaction between the timing of verb models and the focus of the events to which they refer on verb learning by children. Findings revealed that the movement verb was learned better in the impending condition and the result verb in the completed condition. (seven references) (Author/CK)

Examines the implications of connectionist models of cognition for second-language theory, in which all knowledge is embodied in a network of simple processing units joined by connections that are strengthened or weakened in response to regularities in input patterns. A connectionist framework is proposed within which hypotheses about…

This article compares three models of morphological storage and processing: (1) the dual-processing model of Pinker, Marcus and others; (2) the connectionist model of Marchman, Plunkett, Seidenberg, and others; and (3) the network model of Bybee and Langacker. Type frequency of a morphological pattern is shown to be important in determining…

Presents three mini-essays reviewing progress made on three problems in text comprehension (two traditional and one newer problem): their relationship between sentence processes and text processes; individual differences in discourse comprehension; and the representation of multiple-text information, which exposes fresh views of problems of…

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…