An often overlooked but fundamental issue for any comprehensive model of visual-word recognition is the representation of diacritical vowels: Do diacritical and nondiacritical vowels share their abstract letter representations? Recent research suggests that the answer is "yes" in languages where diacritics indicate suprasegmental…

The aim of this project was to identify factors contributing to cross-language semantic preview benefits. In Experiment 1, Russian-English bilinguals read English sentences with Russian words presented as parafoveal previews. The gaze-contingent boundary paradigm was used to present sentences. Critical previews were cognate translations of the…

Traces the history of glottal sounds in humans, and examines some of the functions of the glottal stop in modern languages, particularly French. (AM)

This paper examines negative incorporation in various lects of two historically related sign languages, French Sign Language and American Sign Language. Negative incorporation not only offers interesting insights into the structure of French and American Sign Language, but also into the descriptive and explanatory power of variation theory. By…

Preliminary versions of the papers from the 1985 Summer Institute of Linguistics presented at the University of North Dakota session include: "Referential Distance and Discourse Structure in Yagua" (Thomas E. Payne); "A Note on Ergativity, S', and S'' in Karitiana" (Daniel Everett); "Some Aspects of Zapotecan Clausal…

Although linguistic analysis is only indirectly useful for language teaching, it is directly useful to the language teacher. What language teachers hope to gain from linguistic studies are insights into the language and how it works and functions, so that they can make use of this information when formulating teaching techniques. With this…

Following a brief review of the literature on cognates, and a discussion of six arguments in favor of using cognates as a vocabulary acquisition device, a study is described which was designed to determine whether students were able to utilize English-French cognates in listening and reading comprehension in French. Seventy-four tenth grade…