Children and adults may not realize how much they depend on external sources in understanding word meanings. Four experiments investigated the existence and developmental course of a "Misplaced Meaning" (MM) effect, wherein children and adults overestimate their knowledge about the meanings of various words by underestimating how much they rely on outside sources to determine precise reference....

Children's concurrent success on false belief tasks and their handling of two labels for one object (e.g., bunny/rabbit) has been interpreted as demonstrating understanding about the essential features of representation. Three experiments reveal the limitations in 5-year-olds' understanding for both mental and linguistic representations. We report relatively poor performance on a task involving...

HAKIJTA, KEKJI. Degree of Bilingualism and Cognitioe Ability in Mainland Puerto Rican Children. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1987,58,1372-1388. The relation between degree of bilingualism and cognitive ability was assessed longitudinally in low-income background Puerto Rican elemenschool children in the United States. AI1 subjects were enrolled in a transitional bilingual education program. 83 subjects, ...

The purpose of this study was to examine the character identification strategies of Chinese children during their oral reading of a continuous text. Eighteen second graders’ oral reading of a story, as well as an interview about their decoding strategies, were audiotaped and transcribed. The results generally converged with those of previous oral reading research in alphabetic languages. Childr...

This paper examines the concept of phonological awareness (PA) as it relates to the processing of American Sign Language (ASL). We present data from a recently developed test of PA for ASL and examine whether sign language experience impacts the use of metalinguistic routines necessary for completion of our task. Our data show that deaf signers exposed to ASL from infancy perform better than de...

Detecting and analyzing causal language is essential to extracting semantic relationships. To that end, we present an annotation scheme for English causal language (not metaphysical causality), and discuss two methodologies for annotation. The first uses only a coding manual to train annotators in distinguishing causal from non-causal language. To address low inter-coder agreement, we adopted a...

Over the last few years, Italian sign language courses have attracted a widespread and growing interest from hearing learners who, while not familiar with deafness, are choosing, more more, to embrace this culture, out of mere curiosity or for professional purposes. Three issues will be discussed in paper, set three paragraphs, which author’s opinion some most compelling teaching learning LIS a...

The phenomenon of mixed quotation exhibits clear signs of both the apparent transparency of compositional language use and the opacity of pure quotation. I argue that the interpretation of a mixed quotation involves the resolution of a metalinguistic presupposition. The leading idea behind my proposal is that a mixed-quoted expression, say, “has an anomalous feature”, means what x referred to w...