To produce spontaneous and generalized language use by severely disabled individuals, the language training context and content must be examined. Training methods can better approximate the conditions of natural language use when they involve: generation of spontaneous language responses to effect real-world changes, single performance "trials,"…

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…

Reviews psycholinguistic theories on the relationship between structure and function in language production. Criticizes the theory that sentence structures are reducible to the general forces of cognition that drive interpretation and communication. Argues that syntactic structures are necessary elements in an explanation of language use. (FMW)

Describes an alternate lexico-semantic view of native language acquisition and adult second language learning that proposes that humans acquire and learn words, names, titles, expressions, sayings, and formulas as undifferentiated lexical items first and then develop systems to store and retrieve the lexemes and combine them into phrases and…

Argues that the teachability of language is constrained by what the learner is ready to acquire. The Teachability Hypothesis, based on this constraint, uses a speech processing approach to explain second language acquisition and contains important psycholinguistic information on which second language teaching methods could be based. (Author/CB)

Examines the implications of connectionist models of cognition for second-language theory, in which all knowledge is embodied in a network of simple processing units joined by connections that are strengthened or weakened in response to regularities in input patterns. A connectionist framework is proposed within which hypotheses about…

Discusses the minimal requirements that any serious theory of language acquisition must meet, including the particular properties of the human language processor and linguistic and nonlinguistic input. A review of literature regarding the role of Universal Grammar in second-language acquisition suggests alternative theories to investigate for…

Examines language as a multimodal sensory enhancement system, integrating recent neuroanatomical and neurophysiological findings on the ontogenesis of neuronal structures with the generative concept of Universal Grammar for determination of fundamental differences between primary and secondary language acquisition. (Author/CB)

Paper shows that Wittgenstein, in discussing ostensive definition, understanding, and the private language argument, attacks Saint Augustine's notion of learning. Recently, the Augustinian conception has been resurrected in cognitive theories postulating an innate language of thought, making Wittgenstein's claims that this conception of learning…

Criticizes the computer modelling experiments conducted by Sokolik and Smith (1992), which involved the learning of French gender attribution using connectionist architecture. The article argues that the experiments greatly oversimplified the complexity of gender learning, in that they were designed in such a way that knowledge that must be…

Discusses the development of phraseological machine translation based on the theory that in natural languages, phraseological units cannot always be reduced to words. Describes the phraseological translation process of computer software and machine dictionary systems that translate Russian into English and English into Russian. (JMV)

Analysis of several types of faulty language selection in polyglots revealed that production errors were not a result of limited vocabulary or language deficiency but rather to interlingual code-switching based on the polyglot's differentiations between dominant language, foreign language, and weak language. (20 references) (Author/CB)

Explores the development in children of dual-level phonological processing. The study suggests that even language-delayed six year olds form underlying representations composed of morphophonemic segments. Differences in performance between the groups studied (first graders, young adults, language-delayed first graders) are discussed. (55…

A review is offered of various bilingual memory studies that have been carried out during the past quarter century. Most of the studies have employed lexical items as the investigative tool, tested outside of a grammatical or semantic context. (Contains 58 references.) (JL)

Focuses on the structure/function relationship of the brain and language. Reviews the basic theories concerning cortical structures and language representation. Presents a call that highlights the need to examine the areas of listening, memory, and information retrieval for a more sophisticated analysis of the complex relationship between cortical…