One of a series of semi-annual reports, this publication contains 18 articles which report the status and progress of studies on the nature of speech, instruments for its investigation, and practical applications. Articles are as follows: "The Emergence of Native-Language Phonological Influences in Infants: A Perceptual Assimilation…

This paper adopts the activation spreading theory to explore how lexical items are accessed. Approximately 3300 errors from both public sources and ordinary conversation in Japanese are analyzed. Analyses suggest that there are two types of environment in which contextual lexical errors occur, and that these two types of environment correspond to…

Research shows that information received by one brain hemisphere (e.g., auditory messages entering the right ear) is processed and transferred to the other, interpretation being a combination of right and left brain processing, with high intensity messages shifting control from the left to the right brain. If information is received by one…

The second of three articles on the ways in which people formulate their observations, this paper begins with a discussion of the assumptions underlying analytical and class-based models of cognition. The analytical approach to the measurement of cognition is found to be inappropriate because human cognition, and consequently language processing…

A model for adult language learning should integrate theories in language acquisition with theories about learnability and proposals about adult language structures. Two particular problems in language acquisition are examined: (1) establishing what counts as a formal relationship in a particular domain, and (2) retreating from overgeneralizations…

This study deals with the patterns of word-by-word reading times over a sentence when the subject must code the linguistic information sufficiently for immediate verbatim recall. A class of quantitative models is considered that would account for reading times at phrase breaks. (Author/RM)

A theory of sentence production is presented that accounts for facts about speech errors, including (1) the kinds of errors that occur; (2) the constraints on their form; and (3) the conditions that precipitate them. Two simulation models are introduced to illustrate how the theory applies to phonological encoding processes. (Author/LMO)

Discusses the production paradigm which views human cognition as a flexible system that continuously adapts to new situations and tasks in order to behave efficiently. Discusses the second language learning (English) of a German university student who had studied English for nine years, followed by a three-month stay in the U.S. (SED)

Surveys communications theory and discusses its application to educational organizations. Topics examined include definitions of communication, the evolution of communication models, concepts of language and semantics, interpersonal communication, and organizational communication. Finally, analytic techniques and conceptual frameworks are…

Native users of American Sign Language manipulated sentences in four ways: sign them at slow rate, parse them, make relatedness judgments of pairs of signs taken from each sentence, and recall the sentences. Hierarchical performance structures for each of the sentences were highly similar across tasks. (Author/RD)

Discusses a sequential, three-stage model of how nonliteral expressions are understood, as proposed in recent linguistic, philosophical, and psychological studies. Testing the model's implication that nonliteral meanings of sentences are ignored whenever literal meanings are plausible, finds evidence that both meanings are processed simultaneously…

Research addressing development of mechanistic models capable of acquiring languages on the basis of exposure to linguistic data is reviewed. Research focuses on major issues in developmental psycholinguistics--in particular, nativism and empiricism, the role of semantics and pragmatics, cognitive development, and the importance of simplified…

A cost-benefit and speed-accuracy analysis of semantic priming in a lexical decision task provided information relevant to the automatic-conscious distinction as well as to the operation of discriminability, criterion bias, and response bias in the facilitation. (Author/MH)

Proposes a top-down procedural model for the dynamic extraction and use of context structure to resolve references. (FL)

A neural model in the form of a servo-mechanism is developed to account for certain aspects of language and speech in the human nervous system. Emphasis is placed on encoding processes as well as on-going feedback during production. (SW)