Describes three experiments that explored the informational roles of emphasis and word order in active sentences. The results, when considered together, strongly implicate recentness, but not emphasis, as an important means of linking temporally contiguous sentences. (HTH)

Presents a framework for expressing how choices are made in systemic grammars. Framework represents grammar as combination of systemic syntactic description and explicit choice processes called "choice experts." (DF)

Reports on a study indicating children's dependency in oral persuasion on the cooperative nature of dialog and nonverbal vocalizations and their dependence in written persuasion on persuasive strategies found in speech that can be transferred to writing and, concomitantly, their relatively infrequent use of persuasive strategies specific to…

Examines whether specific characteristics of American Sign Language (ASL) syntax affect perceptual processing of the language. Findings support the psychological reality of sentence embedding processes in ASL, further supporting the claim that visually based languages achieve the same functional goals as speech, although with different means. (FL)

Provides an overview of recent advances in the study of the psychology of question answering, with particular emphasis on the ability to answer questions about coherent spoken and written messages. Examines the components of question answering, employing strategies, memory search, and comparison operations. (SR)

Studies the construction of coherent narrations of events in a picture storybook by children and adults. Applies a causal network discourse analysis. Analyzes the structure and content of the network representation of the main character. Reveals differences in content and structure of the narratives. (HB)

Analyzes the requests for clarification used by instruction receivers. Discusses insights about the interactive nature of communication success and failure with regard to route directions. Provides validation for a model of message comprehension. (HB)

Analyzes children's verbal disputes for the development of discourse markers "because,""so,""and,""but," and "well." Shows that the markers were primarily used to mark the exchange structure of discourse when they were first used by children two years seven months to three years six months and that the first markers to do so were "but" and…

Describes how interactive hand gestures made during conversation help maintain the conversation as a social system. Relates the methods and results of three experiments designed to test this theory. Finds that interactive gestures maintain involvement with the interlocutor without interrupting the flow of conversation. (HB)

Introduces this special issue which describes several approaches to semantic knowledge representations. Discusses the various quantitative procedures employed in the articles, noting that they can also serve as theoretical approaches to knowledge representation. (SR)

Describes a computational model of high-dimensional context space: the Hyperspace Analog to Language (HAL). Shows that HAL provides sufficient information to make semantic, grammatical, and abstract distinctions. Demonstrates the cognitive compatibility of the representations with human processing; and introduces a new methodology that extracts…

Offers an introduction to the theory and implementation of Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), a theory and method for extracting and representing the contextual-usage meaning of words by statistical computations applied to a large corpus of text. Gives an overview of applications and modeling of human knowledge to which LSA has been applied. (SR)

Comments on several quantitative approaches to semantic knowledge representations (the focus of this special issue). Points out some of the ways in which Latent Semantic Analysis and Hyperspace Analog to Language fall short of being plausible theories about psychological reality. Examines in-principle failures and wrong-kind failures that arise in…

Outlines the scenario-mapping and focus (SMF) account of text interpretation, which puts mapping of text onto knowledge in a key position with respect to processing. Reviews supporting evidence. Uses plural reference and nonlogical quantification as illustrations of problems that might be better understood within the SMF framework. (SR)

Assesses three papers in this volume, those by Wellman and Estes, Olson and Torrance, and Hall and Nagy, for their treatment of the following: (1) definition of semantic space, (2) defining children's processes of understanding that space, and (3) describing the contexts in which cognitive language is used. (AEW)