Various communication studies have revealed the existence of a "preverbal" stage of communication consisting of centers within the brain that exists in an innate form or a form preprogrammed for future information acquired from the environment through experience (socialization). Such centers serve to prepare the individual for…

Behaviorism cannot adequately explain language processing. A synthesis of the psycholinguistic and information processing approaches of cognitive psychology, however, can provide the basis for a speculative analysis of reading, if this synthesis is tempered by a perceptual learning theory of uncertainty reduction. Theorists of information…

H.P. Grice's theory of conversation can be used effectively to teach revision in composition courses because it teaches students the rules for effective writing. Grice has formulated a general principle, the Cooperative Principle, based on the assumption that talk-exchanges among speakers are "cooperative efforts" having "a common…

The skilled performance of conference interpreters has aroused some interest of late, both on the part of interpreters interested in studying their own complex skills, and of psychologists interested in cognitive behavior. Recent theories in this field have concentrated on information processing aspects of the task, and on the role of anticipatory…

Examines previous hypotheses of the causes of dyslexia. Proposes that dyslexia results from a subtle language deficiency rather than from defects in the visual system. Discusses current theories and assesses instructional strategies for dyslexics. (ML)

Processing of verbal analogies was evaluated by recording eye fixation patterns during solution of problems that represented a broad range of difficulty. Findings on easier problems replicated previous work. On difficult items, high verbal ability individuals adapted processing strategies to a greater extent then did low ability students.…

Proposes a theoretical information-processing-based neuropsychological model of writing and oral spelling which contains linguistic and motor components and which helps explain agraphia independently of other language disorders. Disruption of the phonological system is thought to cause phonological agraphia. Disruption of the lexical system is…

Examines Piagetian theory in relation to (1) the organizational framework of the reader, (2) the linkage of development and reading, (3) the interrelatedness of language processes, and (4) the twin influences of maturation and experience. Notes the value of Piagetian theory in building reading models and examines two "hurdles" it…

Presents a language processing model that distinguishes four functional components of reading and listening: feature detection, primary recognition, secondary recognition, and rehearsal and recoding. Uses the model to describe and incorporate some recent research. (GT)

Replies to Mellow's (1996) criticism of the authors' second language acquisition model. The article argues that this model is based on the psychological concept of exchange of linguistic information and that Mellow's evaluation of various types of transformational analysis is irrelevant. The article also addresses several points of detail in…

Reviews the eye-movement paradigm and refers to recent experiments applying the paradigm to issues of spoken word recognition (e.g., lexical competitor effects), syntactic processing, reference resolution, focus, as well as issues in cross-modality integration that are central to evaluating the modularity hypothesis. (Seven references) (Author/CK)

Notes that speech intelligibility has traditionally been measured by presenting words mixed in noise to listeners for identification at different signal-to-noise ratios. The words are produced in isolation or in sequence contexts where the predictability of specific items can be varied. Emphasizes that the technique provides valuable data about…

Summarizes the results of Finnish studies dealing with single-word experiments with aphasics as well as lexical decisions and eye-movement registration tests performed on normals. It then proposes a processing model for Finnish nouns, Stem Allomorph/Inflectional Decomposition (SAID), which predicts that both inflected and productive derived forms…

Using a connectionist framework, it is possible to develop models exploring effects of biologically relevant variables on behavior. The ability of such models to explain schizophrenic behavior in terms of biological disturbances is considered, and computer models are presented that simulate normal and schizophrenic behavior in an attentional task.…

Describes a connectionist model, using a simple recurrent network trained on a phoneme prediction task, that accounts for the child's ability to identify word boundaries. The model shows that aspects of linguistic structure that are not overtly marked in the input can be derived by efficiently combining multiple probabilistic cues. (Author/MSE)