Two studies investigated the processing of familiar and unfamiliar figurative language. Subjects read paragraphs containing figurative sentences (proverbs in study 1 and metaphors in study 2) or literal controls; later subjects were given a cued recall test designed to test their memory for contextually inappropriate meanings (a literal cue for a…

A discussion of the connectionist approach to language looks at the nature of language, language processing, and language acquisition. Language processing is seen as a means of satisfying the linguistic constraints of comprehension and production, and is also viewed as a process that operates with other aspects of cognition and involves mutually…

First language acquisition studies reveal that children overextend the minimal distance principle (MDP) during their acquisition of infinitive complement structures. The MDP dictates the interpretation of the logical subject of the infinitive in these structures and overrides marked lexical features such as subject control. Misinterpretations by…

This paper discusses the present state of the art in neurolinguistic studies of bilingualism and delineates areas of further research. The most pertinent studies are reviewed historically. The paper then focuses on some fundamental concepts, such as a definition of bilingualism, interference, recovery process, specific localization, and synchronic…

This is an investigation of the phonological units used by preschool children. Twenty-four English-speaking children aged 4;0 to 5;0 were given three experimental tasks which investigated their ability to segment initial consonant clusters into phoneme-length units: (1) in a segmentation task they gave the first sound of initial cluster words; (2)…

Some psychologically salient meaning properties of lexical items were isolated using judgments about the similarity of meaning within three sets of words: verbs of judging, hypothetical verbs, and locative prepositions. Subjects were asked to rate the similarity of meaning of all possible pairs of words from one of the three domains on a 1-9…

Subjects compared pairs of nonconcrete and "nonimageable" words along a dimension which has no physical analog--the evaluative dimension of the semantic differential. Their reaction time to do so was an inverse logarithmic function of the difference between the numerical "goodness' values they had assigned to the words. (Author/RM)

An experiment tested the hypothesis that the memory representation of a text is a hierarchical structure in which information is ordered from most important to least important. Sentences that tested topic information were verified faster and more accurately than sentences that tested detail information. (Author/RM)

Describes a study that examines the ability of children to identify given/new elements in passive and cleft forms in order to ascertain the relationship between syntactic and pragmatic acquisition. Results indicate that complete competence with these marked sentence forms does not occur universally until some time in adolescence. (SED)

Presents a brief theoretical statement on definition and then discusses a study of the development of definition in children aged 5 to 10. The development of definition is characterized as the gradual articulation of a conventional definitional form out of more general forms of ordinary oral discourse. (NCR)

Describes a study of how the interdependence of speech and gesture is realized in the course of motor planning and execution. Do the two systems operate interactively or do they operate in a ballistic or independent fashion? Four experiments showed that, for deictic expressions, the ballistic view is very nearly correct. (SED)

Looks at recent research on learners' intake of a second language and concludes that second language research has inadequately explored the process of intake. Argues that both theory and the research derived from it need to develop consistent, well-defined models and methods for investigating language learners' processing of input. (SED)

Reports the results of three experiments investigating comprehension and memory for slang metaphors. The experiments examine the thesis that the special pragmatic properties of slang should make these metaphorical expressions easy to understand and remember, especially since speakers frequently share information about the conventional meaning of…

Discusses research which shows that bilinguals in a word recognition task are able to process the words of a language in a language-specific manner without any influence of their knowledge of the surface or conceptual represenations of words in the other language. (EKN)

Investigates the drawing of two types of inferences in English as a second language--presuppositions and implications--from English sentences containing factive and implicative predicates. Results show (1) better comprehension of implied meaning over presupposed meaning, (2) better performance on semantically positive predicative then on…