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We examined adult and 10-13 year old skilled and average comprehenders' representation of spoken sentences. In immediate probe tasks, skilled adults were better than average adults at accessing word order information, but they were poorer at accessing sentence meaning. After hearing a text, skilled adults were more accurate than average adults in recognizing meaning, but they were less accurate in recognizing the wording of test sentences. Speeded speech increased the differences between skill groups more for memory for wording than for memory for meaning. The results suggest that comprehenders compute representations of surface form and meaning independently and simultaneously. These representations compete for attention.

The present study provides evidence that individuals who have different patterns of cerebral lateralization and who develop along different maturational time courses can attain comparable levels of language proficiency. Right-handed individuals with left-handed family members (left-handed familials, LHFs) showed a shorter sensitive period for language acquisition than did right-handed individuals with only right-handed family members (right-handed familials, RHFs). The shorter sensitive period for LHFs may be due to a focus on non-linguistic, word-based conceptual information during language acquisition. RHFs may focus on grammatical relations during language acquisition, which matures later than lexical knowledge. This suggests that there may be different patterns of cerebral lateralization for language in all normal populations as a function of familial handedness.

The assumption that pragmatic probability facilitates the processing of lower linguistic levels is tested and disproved. Two experiments demonstrate that detection of acoustic properties that distinguish two speakers is harder in more pragmatically probable sentences and indicate that discourse- and sentence-level representations are functionally distinct during comprehension. (57 references) (JL)

Compares three linguistically motivated algorithms for assigning between-word space sizes for their impact on text readability. Finds that the readability of text can be improved with the aid of a rudimentary automatic parser. (PRA)

We present a series of three analyses of young children' s linguistic input to determine the distributional information it could plausibly offer to the process of grammatical category learning. Each analysis was conducted on four separate corpora from the CHILDES database (MacWhinney, 2000) of speech directed to children under 2;5. We show that, in accord with other findings, a distributional analysis which categorizes words based on their co-occurrence patterns with surrounding words successfully categorizes the majority of nouns and verbs. In Analyses 2 and 3, we attempt to make our analyses more closely relevant to natural language acquisition by adopting more realistic assumptions about how young children represent their input. In Analysis 2, we limit the distributional context by imposing phrase structure boundaries, and find that categorization improves even beyond that obtained from less limited contexts. In Analysis 3, we reduce the representation of input elements which young children might not fully process and we find that categorization is not adversely affected: Although noun categorization is worse than in Analyses 1 and 2, it is still good; and verb categorization actually improves. Overall, successful categorization of nouns and verbs is maintained across all analyses. These results provide promising support for theories of grammatical category formation involving distributional analysis, as long as these analyses are combined with appropriate assumptions about the child learner' s computational biases and capabilities. Keywords: Distributional structure; Grammatical categories; Young children

Four experiments show that people differ strongly in the extent to v^ich they depend on linguistic structure during language comprehension.Structure-dependent people are immediately affected by grammatical variables,vrtiile structure-independent people are less affected by such variables. A surprising population difference between the two types of people suggests a genetic and neurological basis for the behavioral difference. All subjects were right-handed. However, structure-dependent people report no left-handers in their family, while structure-independent people do report left-handers in their family. This suggests that the neurological organization for linguistic ability in right handers with familial left-handedness, is more diffuse than for right handers with no familial left-handedness. Other facts connect this to a current hormonal theory of the ontogenesis of hemispheric asymmetries.

Three groups of pigeons were trained to discriminate between a target temporal sequence, consisting of red, green, and blue, and distractor sequences consisting of all other combinations of these three colors presented on a pecking key. Response alternatives were provided during the course of the trial (on-line decisions) as well as at the end of the time (postsequence decisions). Different temporal phrasing patterns emphasized the first stimulus in the sequence, the final stimulus, or all stimuli equally. The phrasing pattern did not affect the speed of acquisition, but groups receiving emphasized stimuli relied more heavily on those stimuli than on the other stimuli for their discriminations. The patterns of both on-line choices during the sequence and terminal choices following the sequence were consistent with the use of hierarchical representations and inconsistent with a simple item-by-item prospective discrimination scheme.

In two experiments, subjects were interrupted while listening to a two-clause sentence just before the last word of either the initial clause or the final clause. The two experiments together suggest that interclause semantic relations affect the immediate processing of clauses. (Author/EJS)