This study investigates whether second language (L2) phonological learning can be characterized as a gradual and systematically patterned replacement of nonnative segments by native segments in learners' speech, conforming to a two-stage implicational scale. We adopt a dynamic approach to language variation based on Gatbonton's (1975, 1978)…

This study examined the effects of being born very preterm on children's early language development using prospective longitudinal data from a representative regional cohort of 90 children born very preterm (gestational age less than 33 weeks and/or birth weight less than 1,500 grams) and a comparison sample of 102 children born full term…

D. C. Plaut and J. R. Booth presented a parallel distributed processing model that purports to simulate human lexical decision performance. This model (and D. C. Plaut, 1995) offers a single mechanism account of the pattern of factor effects on reaction time (RT) between semantic priming, word frequency, and stimulus quality without requiring a…

Although developmental increases in the size of the position effect within a mispronunciation detection task have been interpreted as consistent with a view of the lexical restructuring process as protracted, the position effect itself might not be reliable. The current research examined the effects of position and clarity of acoustic-phonetic…

Three studies investigated the effects of concrete versus abstract wording and negative versus positive premises on the difficulty subjects had in solving several kinds of reasoning tasks. Subjects for all three studies were college undergraduates who received booklets containing either hypothetical, disjunctive, or linear syllogisms. Each booklet…

A discussion of the ways that consciousness may be involved in learning the principles of second-language discourse and pragmatics draws on current theories of the role of consciousness in human learning in general, with suggestions for extension to the learning of pragmatics. First, research on the degree of consciousness in pragmatic learning…

Three experiments used "rhyme priming," a methodology in which lexical decisions to a visually presented word are facilitated when the word is preceded by a rhyming word, to investigate the access and maintenance of speech-based codes in sentence comprehension. In these experiments, the pairs were visually dissimilar rhymes, such as…

Theoreticians have been asking for a long time what processes are involved in comprehension of figurative language, but psycholinguists have only recently addressed this question. One specific type of figurative expression, the metaphor, has been the focus of much recent research, in part because it promises to contribute much to the understanding…

These proceedings are a collection of papers by researchers in neurology, bilingualism, linguistics, and the neurolinguistics of bilingualism. Topics are addressed using neurolinguistic data for second language learning, learning models for second language acquisition, and implications for teaching and research. Summaries of the following papers…

This review of research into the acquisition of grammatical coordination (i.e., the use of conjunctions) pulls together both English language and cross-linguistic data. Although the importance of pragmatic factors in language acquisition is not denied, the data make it clear that grammatical factors seem to play a significant role in the…

A major concern in recent research is whether perceptual or functional information is of primary importance in children's early word meanings. In the study described here, artificial objects were used so that form and function could be independently manipulated. There were 57 subjects, ranging in age from 2.5 years to adulthood. The subjects were…

Forty Swedish university students produced sentences from homographs that could be interpreted either as verbs or nouns. The words also varied in degree of polysemy (multiple meaning). The results indicated that the subjects prefered verb productions when the words were grouped according to objective frequency. This was more evident when the…

The results of two experiments indicate that the two phonological properties of a word, its initial phoneme and length, strongly influence the latency to detect a target phoneme which begins the following word. Studies showing increased detection latencies following ambiguity are analyzed. (SW)

This study examines two views of lexical storage and word production, a derivational hypothesis and an independent unit hypothesis. Reaction times and errors were related to derivational complexity. A model of lexical retrieval process incorporating derivational processes is proposed. (Author/SW)

To show the organization of recall, items that are remembered together can be written on the same line of a two-dimensional (2D) grid. Such 2D recall does not induce the clustering it reveals. Various aspects of 2D recall and the clustering it reveals are discussed. (Author/RM)