Considered whether modeling and the type of an adult's request influenced children's ability at age 1 year and 8 months and 2 years and 2 months to comprehend gestures and replica objects as symbols for familiar objects. Evaluated whether modeling and type of request influenced children's ability at 1 year and 8 months to understand familiar…

Responds to comments made regarding an earlier article written by the author on processing instruction in second language learning. (Author/VWL)

Evaluated adult age differences in language comprehension with groups of young adults (age 20-35), young old adults (age 55-69), and old old adults (age 70-87). The results suggest that speed of comprehension processes required to match related terms in sentence pairs is not impaired with age as long as terms do not have to be remembered.…

A systematic analysis of the French interrogative focuses on the distinction between the syntactic processes (identification of question words, interrogative phrase preposing, and rules of question formation) and phonological processes (intonation patterns) that characterize questions in French. (Author/MSE)

Investigates whether patient animacy affected the acquisition of the passive construction of syntax of 32 children aged two-five years. Results indicate that children who were taught the passive with animate patients produced more passives in the teaching phase than did comparable children who received inanimate patients. (RJC)

Examines effect of training 70 preschool children with animate agent + animate patient sentences (AAV) or animate agent + inanimate patient sentences (IAV). Children were tested with noun-noun-verb (NNV) order sentence to assess whether AAV or IAV produced better comprehension. AAV and IAV showed comparable results at age three, IAV resulted in…

Investigation of profoundly deaf adolescent students' ability to read signs in peripheral vision revealed a mean success rate of about 80 percent. Results support the supposition that peripheral vision may be linguistically and communicatively useful for deaf people, particularly as signs in isolation are more difficult to read than signs in…

Reviews the history of verbal data in a variety of fields, places protocol analysis in its historical context, and examines more recent claims and criticisms regarding protocol analysis. Concludes that protocol analysis, when conducted according to certain principles, can be an important tool for researching the composing process. (MG)

Three- to nine-year-olds' (N=80) post-exposure production of regular and irregular suffixes indicated that subjects found it easier to learn a regular suffix when they heard it used with phonetically similar base forms. Subjects were more likely to overgeneralize the regular suffix to irregular forms when they had heard it used in conjunction with…

Hudson addressed two issues on second-language acquisition: the validity of the multidimensional model and the application of developmental sequence findings to assessment and pedagogy. This response suggests that his lines of argument are based on serious conceptual flaws. (Contains 37 references.) (LB)

This study of sequential memory in 16 children with language impairment found that list-final suffix effect was substantially larger than in control children, even though other aspects of their recall were normal. Children with language impairment were more dependent upon unanalyzed acoustic and phonetic representations of speech. Response…

The Shortlist model is presented, which incorporates the desirable properties of earlier models of back-propagation networks with recurrent connections that successfully model many aspects of human spoken word recognition. The new model is entirely bottom-up and can readily perform simulations with vocabularies of tens of thousands of words. (DR)

Finds that temporal markers modify the availability of preceding words: segmentation markers like "around two o'clock" and "then" reduce this availability, whereas continuity markers like "and" improve this availability. Supports the hypothesis that segmentation markers lead readers not to integrate new information…

Examines the role of a "local cue"--the grammatical aspect expressed by the verb "ru/-ta"--in Japanese temporal clauses. Ninety-six children were examined. Results show that the success of verb forms as clues requires that temporal relations be clearly expressed. This supports the claim that overt surface clues facilitate…

Connectionist (parallel distributed processing) modeling provides a new way to approach the neurological study of language. This method focuses on the interplay between a computational model and the appropriate neurological, neuropsychological, and speech and language data, couched in connectionist mechanisms that map naturally to what is known of…