An experiment is reported comparing the pluralization patterns exhibited by American college students studying German with those of adult and child native speakers of German. Respondents' pluralization of 30 nonsense words did not reveal significant interference between English and German in this regard. (PMJ)

Describes a set of questionnaires administered to 400 French speakers in France and Switzerland to study variation in the position of the adjective in a noun phrase. The first objective was to separate rigidly structured contexts from those affected by fluctuations, the second was to detect regularities and hesitations in individual behavior. (MES)

This study examined whether the use of complex headed nominal structures resulted in a higher qualitative rating of a passage than the use of simple headed nominal structures and whether the use of more mature vocabulary resulted in a higher qualitative rating of a passage than the use of simple vocabulary. (HOD)

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)

Ratings of concreteness and picturability and production data for meaningfulness of 310 words were gathered from sixth-grade children and college students. (JMB)

Confirms previous observations about the tonal character of English stress. Notes that Finnish listeners relied on duration as the perceptual cue for noun/noun phrase distinction (blackbird/black bird), reflecting the absence of linguistic contrasts based on an active use of the larynx in standard Finnish stress and intonation. (Author/RL)

Describes the use of some determiners in French and shows how their syntactic and semantic roles are interrelated. (Text is in French.) (TL)

Three experiments examined preschoolers' and adults' understanding of distinctive semantic functions of adjectives and count nouns. Found that 4-year olds and adults, but not 3-year olds, who heard the adjective version (e.g., "a blue bird") were more likely than those who heard the count noun version ("a bluebird") to choose…

Attempts to show that exophora falls within the category of anaphora proper and not deixis; it is in terms of a conceptual representation of the situation evoked that the anaphor is interpreted; and exphora is a more central manifestation of anaphora than the "endophoric" type. Naturally occurring data from English and French are the…

Addresses the position of adjectives in the noun phrase in Modern Greek, concentrating on the possible interpretations that the adjective can have relative to the noun. Differences observed between definite and indefinite noun phrases are suggested to be consequences of their predicative nature and the way this interacts with the…

Demonstrates the similarities between English and Farsi with respect to discourse-functional constraints on inversion. It is argued that this phenomenon is significant because these two languages exhibit different canonical word order and thus expectations can be raised from some functional-syntactic universals. (15 references) (Author/CK)

Analyzes the use of verb-noun collocations by advanced German speaking students of English in free written production. Types of mistakes that learners make when producing collocations are identified. The influence of the degree of restriction of a combination and of learners' first language on the production of collocations is investigated. (VWL)

Examines form-similar nouns in early lexical development of a bilingual German/English child, as well as effects of form similarity in picture naming and translation in two groups of German/English children. Results show an effect of form similarity in early lexical development; form similar words occurred frequently in the beginning of the…

What errors in English subject-to-verb agreement reveal about the syntactic nature of sentence subjects was investigated. Participants in 3 experiments included 104 undergraduates and 64 members of a university community. Results suggest the abstract syntactic relation of subject controls/mediates verb agreement, not notional properties and…

Discusses the interpretation of nominal compounds in the context of natural language processing for information retrieval. Knowledge-intensive algorithms that can successfully interpret compounds found in technical documents are described, and experiments are reported that indicate these algorithms may be unnecessary for improving retrieval…