Analysis of the conversations of 6 children (mean age 11 years) with semantic-pragmatic disorder found they were more likely to produce initiating utterances (rather than acknowledging or responding utterances) with both familiar and unfamiliar partners than other children of similar age or ability. Subjects did not produce more utterances or…

Three experiments investigated the nature of productive forward linking (from semantics to syntax) and productive reverse linking (from syntax to semantics) in language-impaired children. Found that the normally developing control subjects showed a good use of productive forward and reverse linking, whereas the language-impaired subjects…

Discusses T. S. Eliot's communicational scepticism, defined as "...the idea that meaning is to some extent private to each individual, since language is an inadequate instrument for conveying thoughts from one mind to another." The article examines various issues relating to the literary criticism of Eliot's poetry. (20 references) (CK)

The relation between similarity and dissimilarity of context was analyzed for synonymous nouns. New semantic similarity and dissimilarity rating tests with an empirically determined series of linguistic anchors and conventional, arbitrarily anchored semantic similarity ratings were compared. Contextual similarity was elicited by a sorting test…

Examined how 3- and 5-year-olds and adults extend names for human-made artifacts. Found that even 3-year-olds were more likely to provide artifact names (e.g., "knife") when they believed objects were intentionally created and to provide material-based descriptions (e.g., "plastic") when they believed objects were accidentally…

This study documents the sensitivity of English-French interlanguage to the process-result distinction with respect to the licensing of multiple postnominal genitives, despite a lack of direct positive or negative evidence for this distinction in the input. Documentation argues that the Universal Grammar-governed map between syntactic structures…

The adverbial phrase "a lo mejor" (at best) does not take the subjunctive, although other adverbial expressions of possibility may be followed by either indicative or subjunctive. Examines statements co-occurring with "a lo mejor" from the viewpoint of statement and mood, taking into account communicative discourse function. The study shows that…

Provides an analysis of the frequency of verbs and their syntactic requirements in "Interchange" (Richards et al., 1991), a popular series of textbooks for English as a Second Language (ESL). A corpus analysis of "Interchange" suggests that ESL materials may underrepresent some of the verb classes that are known to cause learners difficulty.…

A "hippocampal amnesiac" (H.M.) and memory-normal controls of similar age, background, intelligence, and education read novel sentences aloud in tasks where fast and accurate reading was or was not the primary goal. H.M produced more misreadings than normal and cerebellar controls, usually without self-correction. Results support a theoretical…

Derived equivalence relations, it has been argued, provide a behavioral model of semantic or symbolic meaning in natural language, and thus equivalence relations should possess properties that are typically associated with semantic relations. The present study sought to test this basic postulate using semantic priming. Across three experiments,…

Readers construct at least two interrelated representations when they comprehend a text: (a) a representation of the explicit ideas in a text and the relations among them (i.e., a propositional representation) and (b) a representation of the context or situation to which a text refers (i.e., a discourse model). In a recent study, Long and Baynes…

The authors evaluated the roles of auditory-verbal short-term memory, visual short-term memory, and group membership in predicting language comprehension, as measured by an experimental sentence comprehension task (SCT) and the Test for Auditory Comprehension of Language--Third Edition (TACL-3; E. Carrow-Woolfolk, 1999) in 38 participants: 19 with…

This paper examines how future metadata capabilities could enable academic libraries to exploit information on the emerging Semantic Web in their library catalogues. Whereas current metadata architectures treat the Web as a simple means of interchanging bibliographic data that have been created by libraries, this paper suggests that academic…

This meta-analysis pools data from 25 years of research on the order of acquisition of English grammatical morphemes by students of English as a second language (ESL). Some researchers have posited a "natural" order of acquisition common to all ESL learners, but no single cause has been shown for this phenomenon. Our study investigated…

Back-translation is typically used to verify semantic equivalence (SE) of a translated measure to the original scale. Although validity of the adapted scale depends fundamentally on SE, back-translation always involves subjective evaluations. This study developed "dual-language, split-half quantitative methods of verification to supplement…