Two experiments involving Chinese 2nd graders and 4th graders investigated the use of subcharacter information to learn to pronounce unfamiliar semantic-phonetic compound characters. Experiment 1 confirmed that children can use the information in both tone-different and onset-different characters to learn character pronunciations and showed that…

Current models of word production offer different accounts of the representation of homophones in the lexicon. The investigation of how the homophone status of a word affects lexical access can be used to test theories of lexical processing. In this study, homophones appeared as word distractors superimposed on pictures that participants named…

An event-related brain potential experiment was carried out to investigate the temporal relationship between lexical selection and the semantic integration in auditory sentence processing. Participants were presented with spoken sentences that ended with a word that was either semantically congruent or anomalous. Information about the moment in…

The increasingly integrative use of images with language in many different types of texts in electronic and paper media has created an urgent need to go beyond logocentric accounts of literacy and literacy pedagogy. Correspondingly there is a need to augment the genre, grammar and discourse descriptions of verbal text as resources for literacy…

Two lawful relationships involving word-initial onset clusters have been advanced in the acquisition literature; namely, that clusters imply affricates, and that liquid clusters imply a liquid distinction. This study evaluated and extended the validity of these implicational laws in a population of 110 children (aged 3;0 to 8;6) with functional…

Acquisition by Processing Theory (APT) is a unified account of language processing and learning that encompasses both L1 and L2 acquisition. Bold in aim and broad in scope, the proposal offers parsimony and comprehensiveness, both highly desirable in a theory of language acquisition. However, the sweep of the proposal is accompanied by an economy…

In this article we discuss different views about how information flows through the lexical system in bilingual speech production. In the first part, we focus on some of the experimental evidence often quoted in favor of the parallel activation of the bilinguals' two languages from the semantic system in the course of language production. We argue…

In noun compounds in English, the modifying noun may be singular ("mouse-eater") or an irregularly inflected plural ("mice-eater"), but regularly inflected plurals are dispreferred (*"rats-eater"). This phenomenon has been taken as strong evidence for dual-mechanism theories of lexical representations, which hold that regular (rule-governed) and…

This paper addresses the problem of learning the class of raising verbs (e.g. seem). These verbs are potentially problematic for learners in that unlike typical main verbs, these verbs do not stand in a semantic relation with any Noun Phrase (NP) arguments. Moreover, a second class of verbs, known as control verbs, shares certain distributional…

The origin and functions of the hand and arm gestures that accompany speech production are poorly understood. It has been proposed that gestures facilitate lexical retrieval, but little is known about when retrieval is accompanied by gestural activity and how this activity is related to the semantics of the word to be retrieved. Electromyographic…

In this article, we apply tools from cultural historical theory to an analysis of a series of meetings between a group of linguists and one of Mayan women. The article describes a journey from the two groups' initial acquaintance to the formation of a shared object--a literacy project--thereby providing an analysis of six visits to Nebaj,…

One of the longstanding issues in language research has been the extent to which the mechanisms underlying language acquisition are uniquely human. The primary goal of this article is to introduce the reader to some of the recent developments in comparative language research that have shed new light on this issue. To appreciate the significance of…

Some time ago, Geoffrey Saxe (1994) published an article in "Mind, Culture, and Activity" that invoked a distinction between a method of inquiry and empirical techniques. Techniques are approaches to data gathering like observations, interviews, and surveys, as well as research designs. They are a tool kit for empirical work. Deeply linked to…

Looking back at the past 15 years in the field of second language acquisition (SLA), the authors select and discuss several important developments. One is the impact of various sociocultural perspectives such as Vygotskian sociocultural theory, language socialization, learning as changing participation in situated practices, Bakhtin and the…

Explores typology-based differences in patterns of bilingual behavior by analyzing code-switches of Korean-English bilingual speakers, a language group that has not received much study so far. Data collected from 20 balanced bilinguals were analyzed to address the issues of linguistic constraints on code-switching and applicability of concepts of…