Discusses three experiments which investigated the role of convention and context in understanding indirect requests. Experiments 1 and 2 showed the wide variety of conventions used and how context determines conventionality. Experiment 3 showed how conventional requests take less time to process than nonconventional ones. (Author/PJM)

Shows that hesitation phenomena are intricately connected with propspective and retrospective speech production tasks and mark critical points in processing. Two major hesitation categories exist: stalls and repairs. Stalls head off errors and represent error-free output; repairs take care of errors already committed. English and German examples…

Concludes (1) that both learning disabled and "normal" primary school students can learn automatic prime contrast relationships of space, time, and amount and (2) that what they learn remains with them over time. (FL)

A model of the structure of complex words based on an organization of the internal lexicon by shared-meaning content is proposed. Results of traditional linguistic experiments testing the hypothesis show that meaning content is a more salient basis for judgments of similarity and difference than is meaning structure. (PMJ)

Demonstrates that a more direct cause of verbal slips is occasional noise or interference in the phonological encoding processes, with the associations provided by cognitive states (and verbal context) serving merely as reference information for the semantic phase of prearticulatory editing. Relates this to "Freudian slips." (JMF)

Offers a number of techniques designed to challenge or alter or disrupt how a student perceives reality, thereby facilitating student development in creative thinking. (RL)

Pronoun mastery demands a knowledge of speech roles and an ability to identify oneself and others in those roles. Twenty-one girls' knowledge of "my,""your," and "her" was assessed when they were speakers, addressees, and nonaddressed listeners. The children were aware of speech roles only when they themselves occupied these roles. (PJM)

Describes three experiments conducted to examine the superior retention of related word pairs when the second word in the pair required active construction by the subject. The results confirm the importance of subjects' checking solution adequacy and of associative relationships in recall. (PMJ)

The purpose of this study was to determine whether or not children in grades two, four, and six make consistent use of Haviland and Clark's Given-New Strategy in visually and aurally comprehending presuppositive negatives. (HOD)

Analyzes the perceptual problems of 22 nonnative speakers of English who transcribed spontaneous speech. Finds that perception resembles a matching of the listener's projection and the incoming acoustic information, that native/nonnative perception strategies were similar, and that hesitation phenomena were important sources of nonnative speakers'…

Assesses the relationship between production deficits and speech perception abilities. A categorical perception paradigm was administered to a group of communication disordered children and to a matched control group. Group results are tentatively interpreted as showing a moderate perceptual deficit in the communication disordered children of this…

Discusses reasons for including prosody in the management of language impairment in children and presents a classification framework that includes four categories of prosodic problems: dysprosody (pitch, loudness, duration, and pausing), prosodic disability (tempo, intonation, stress, and rhythm), prosodic disturbance (interaction disruption), and…

Examined capacity of 4-month olds to identify their maternal language (Catalan or Spanish) when phonologically similar languages are contrasted. Compared infants from monolingual and bilingual environments to analyze whether differences in linguistic background affect this behavioral response. Found that language discrimination is already possible…

Considers the fact that prosody is a grammatical (phonological) structure that must be parsed. The article describes prosodic categories marked by intonational pattern for English and Japanese, concentrates on "pitch accent" and tonally marked "phrases," and discusses potential ambiguities in parsing these categories. (60…

Discusses two auditory comprehension studies that investigated the role of focus, as conveyed by a pitch accent, in the comprehension of relative clauses preceded by a complex noun phrase. Findings include focus attracts modifiers, and pitch accents for new phrases differ acoustically from pitch accents for contrastive phrases. (46 references)…