The role of awareness or consciousness in learning has been a relatively contentious issue in non-SLA fields (e.g., cognitive psychology). With the publications of Williams (2004, 2005), a similar debate appears to be brewing in the field of SLA. Contrary to Leow (2000), who reported that unawareness did not appear to play an important role in…

We present four experiments on the interpretation of pronouns and reflexives in picture noun phrases with and without possessors (e.g. "Andrew's picture of him/himself, the picture of him/himself"). The experiments (two off-line studies and two visual-world eye-tracking experiments) investigate how syntactic and semantic factors guide the…

This article discusses an attempt to establish a model of the cognitive strategies used by a child in the acquisition of nouns and the stages in the process of categorizing reality. (Text is in Italian.) (CFM)

Research supported by a United States Public Health Grant to Edward E. Smith. (VM)

Four experiments were conducted to investigate the memory status of inflectional forms of verbs, irregular past tense words, and adjective and nominal derivatives of verbs. Results indicated that inflections do not have memory representations separate from their base words, but adjective and nominal derivatives and irregular past tense words do.…

Two experiments examine the extent to which the representation of a sentence depends upon the overall nature of a subject's task, in this case, memorization of a sentence and providing a continuation for a sentence. (AM)

STUDIES WERE MADE OF THE ABILITY OF KINDERGARTEN CHILDREN TO CONTROL CORRECT PLURALIZATION RULES FOR ENGLISH NOUNS. PRODUCTION AND RECOGNITION TASKS WERE USED, WITH CARTOON PICTURES OF ANIMALS WITH NONSENSE NAMES. THE CHILDREN WERE ASKED TO GIVE SINGULAR NAMES FROM CORRECT PLURAL NAMES, AND VICE VERSA, AND TO CHOOSE THE BEST NAMES FOR THE ANIMALS.…

Results show that basic objects are shown to be the most inclusive categories for which a concrete image of the category as a whole can be formed, to be the first categorizations made during perception of the environment and to be the categories most codable, most coded, and most necessary in language. (Author/DEP)

It is suggested that twin discourse functions are served by thematization and topicalization, the former providing stable referential focus and the latter providing momentary referential focus. (Author/AM)

This paper reports eight experiments with elementary school children and college students concerning the form class effect. Results confirmed several predictions regarding the effects on recall of enhanced organization between pairs of nouns by verb connectives versus conjunction connectives. (Author/JMB)

Two experiments examined the role of presupposed (or old) and focal (or new) information in integrating sentences, by measuring comprehension time for various combinations of presupposed and focal information. (Author/AM)

Reports on four experiments designed to compare the accuracy of the listener's memory for information associated with the thematic and nonthematic portions of sentences. Results are consistent with the identification of the nonthematic portion of a sentence as the locus of new ideas conveyed to the language recipient. (CLK)