Studies analyzing children's response time to detect word targets revealed that six-year-olds and younger children generally did not show the response time advantage for accented target words which adult listeners show, providing support for the argument that the processing advantage for accented words reflects the semantic role of accent as an…

Compares artificial intelligence and information retrieval paradigms for natural language understanding, reviews progress to date, and outlines the applicability of artificial intelligence to question answering systems. A list of principal artificial intelligence software for database front end systems is appended. (CLB)

This document presents a theory of how the psychology and neurobiology of stimulus appraisal influence variability in second language acquisition, and extends the notion of affect developed for second language acquisition to primary language acquisition and to cognition in general. The first chapter lays out a psychological framework that develops…

A major synthesis of the latest research on early language acquisition, this book explores what gives infants the remarkable capacity to progress from babbling to meaningful sentences, and what inclines a child to speak. The book examines the neurological, perceptual, social, and linguistic aspects of language acquisition in young children, from…

For use by teachers in helping students become better writers, this booklet describes and illustrates cognitive mapping, a prewriting technique that helps students combine their verbal and visual skills in order to produce ideas and to plan stories, plays, reports, or essays. The first section of the booklet discusses the interrelations between…

The fact that some people learn a second language more easily than others has prompted numerous studies designed to link one factor or another with successful language learning. This work examines a large number of these studies to assess the importance of various factors involved in language learning. The influencing factors suggested are grouped…

Acknowledging the importance of sight to the writing process, the paper elucidates the processes of vision related to the composing process. In the opening section the physics of light and vision, optic neuroanatomy, and cortical responses to visual stimuli are explained. Next, theories of vision and data mapping are examined and their…

Research indicates that people have two distinct information processing modalities, one for verbal material and one for nonverbal material. The nonverbal mode is used for visual images and is characterized by creative and relatively undisciplined associations. The verbal mode deals with abstract stimuli and is restrained by logic and the need to…

A review of "Sign Languages Used by Deaf People, and Psycholinguistics: A Critical Evaluation" (A. Van Uden, 1986), a book "denying that ...there is any such thing as a sign language," points out that a sign language's perceived lack of phonological and morphological rules is a more social than linguistic problem. (CB)

Teaching organizational strategies to language-disordered children can improve comprehension and formulation of written language. The semantic organizer approach involves activating and organizing prior knowledge, understanding text structure, and developing organizational strategies with both a verbal component and a graphic-structure component.…

Examination of existing empirical and theoretical literature suggests there is no conclusive support for the existence of a critical period for human speech learning. Assumption of a critical period may inhibit the search for testable hypotheses concerning observed adult-child differences in second language production. (Author/LMO)

This paper discusses the increasing use of computers and multimedia since 1989 in the foreign language classroom in the Czech Republic. Three categories of questions are discussed: (1) questions about computer use in classrooms that were common in Germany 10 years ago; (2) questions about computer use in relation to new foreign language…

A computer-assisted language learning (CALL) software evaluation form that looks directly at important aspects of language teaching approaches is presented. Examples of typical evaluation checklists are described to illustrate how they fail to address the appropriate questions for language teaching software. Three major categories of language…

Communicative proficiency, defined as native-like ability to use the language as a medium of two-way communication, is most effectively and efficiently achieved through instruction emphasizing development of listening and reading comprehension skills, and virtually excluding training in production. The comprehension approach avoids the teaching of…

In addressing selected aspects of the language arts from the context of an integrative language paradigm, this paper focuses on the results of three studies recently completed in Manitoba, which help to shed some light on three modes of expression--dictation, independent writing, and retelling--in the primary grades. The first part of the paper…