Discusses recent brain research as it pertains to reading instruction. (DD)

Indicates a difference between animate/inanimate subjects and objects in reversible sentences. Suggests that animatedness may be an important variable in children's early comprehension of speech, and that the traditional definition of reversibility should be modified to clarify the effects of probability and animatedness. (Author/RL)

The command-following behavior of holophrastic children was compared to that of telegraphic children. Four holoprastic and four telegraphic children learning English as a first language, and three holophrastic and the telegraphic children learning Spanish as a first language were tested. No significant differences were found among the four groups.…

The hypothesis that free recall involves the generation of candidate items followed by a decision process was tested in a situation which compared a standard recall test with a test that involved the overt generation and recognition of candidate items. (SW)

Establishes a significant correlation between the extent of Creole language interference and performance on a British reading comprehension test. Suggests that Creole affects the efficiency of understanding British English. (Author/RL)

Examined whether the preferences of verbs for appearing in particular subcategory structures can influence parsing and whether this influence is graded according to the strength of the preferences. Findings suggest that the verb subcategory preferences do produce a graded influence on the parse, according to their strength. (28 references)…

A study of 11 kindergarten and 11 second-grade students evaluated the effects of target word frequency and age on normally achieving children's performance of naming and phonological awareness tasks. Results supported an explicit connection between lexical retrieval and phonological awareness, mediated by working memory. (CR)

Presents the gating paradigm as it is used in spoken word recognition research. In this task, a spoken-language stimulus is presented in segments of increasing duration and subjects are asked to propose the word being presented and to give a confidence rating after each segment. The advantages and problems associated with this task are discussed.…

Suggests that knowledge organization must encompass theories that focus on the more fundamental and less technical view and raises the questions of epistemology and general linguistic theory. Focuses on the meaning aspect of language and the terminological aspect of knowledge organization. Considers theories of terminology, language and meaning,…

Syntactic processing was explored in nine individuals who stutter (IWS). Grammaticality judgments and event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were obtained while participants read sentences, half containing verb-agreement violations, via computer or paper. Judgment accuracy of IWS for the online task, but not offline, was lower, especially for more…

Two eye-tracking experiments examined spoken language processing in Russian-English bilinguals. The proportion of looks to objects whose names were phonologically similar to the name of a target object in either the same language, the other language, or both languages at the same time was compared to the proportion of looks in a control condition…

Revives Eric Hawkins' idea of a language "trivium" where language awareness activities should fill the space between the learner's two languages. Draws a distinction between awareness and consciousness of language and suggests that cross-linguistic relationships are a major source of input salience strengthening, due to bilinguals'…

A study evaluated the language production of 12 children (ages 5-8) who continued stuttering for 36 months or more after onset, 10 who recovered 18-36 months post onset, and 10 who recovered within 18 months of onset of stuttering. The majority of the children performed in the average range on measures of language production. (Author/CR)

Justification offered by Steven Pinker for his theory that thought is independent of language, and that thought is couched in some silent medium of the brain ("Mentalese"), is outlined step by step and critiqued. It is argued that the theory ignores deep technical issues and is not explanatory. (MSE)

Proposes a theoretical framework called NLPIR that integrates natural language processing (NLP) into information retrieval (IR) based on the assumption that there exists representation distance between queries and documents. Discusses problems in traditional keyword-based IR, including relevance, and describes some existing NLP techniques.…