Peter A. Reich

Stages in sentence production: An analysis of speech error data

The hypothesis that sentence production is organized into independent positional and functional stages is tested using speech error data. Contrary to predictions from the hypothesis it was found that sound misordering errors tend to create words and that word errors, such as substitutions and misorderings, tend to involve similar sounding words. In addition, it was found that incorrectly substituted words often show both a semantic and phonological relationship to the intended words. A proposal regarding the stages of production is developed that accounts for the results. It is assumed that information can leak between stages by way of the mental lexicon and cause the decision making at a given stage to be affected in a probabilistic manner by information from other stages.

The early acquisition of word meaning

The development of the meaning of shoe in one pre-lingual child, plus additional examples drawn from the literature, support a notion that word meanings start out very narrow and only become overextended later, though sometimes before the word is spoken. This appears to contradict the course of development of meaning hypothesized by Clark (1973). It is argued that the early development of word meaning is simply a special case of a much more general learning process.

The Construction of an Orally Based Sight-Word Vocabulary List and Its Relationship to the Vocabularies of Beginning Readers

AbstractShort, sight-word vocabulary lists were derived from the spontaneous speech of four different groups of children and compared with previously published lists. Very high levels of agreement were found for function, but not for content words. However, the four new lists were very similar to one another, probably as a result of the procedures used in this study as compared to those used in previous studies. A composite list was then constructed based on the results from the four groups. The lists are also compared with the vocabulary in six beginning reading series.

Language without a central pushdown stack

We will attempt to show how human performance limitations on various types of syntactic embedding constructions in Germanic languages can be modelled in a relational network linguistic framework. After arguing against centralized data stores such as pushdown stacks and queues, we will demonstrate how interconnections among levels of linguistic structure can account for many of the psycholinguistic facts.