In this volumume prominent scholars from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds are brought together to review the empirical studies on the ability to reflect upon and manipulate the phonemic segments of speech, and to present their insights on the relationship of phonological aware- ness to the reading process.

We had our first conversation about cognition, metacognition, and reading in September of 1976. Our particular concern was with reading and learning to read, and what, if anything, meta cognition might have to do with it all. We didn't really know much about metacognition then, of course, but then most other people were in the same predicament. Some people had been working with interesting approaches and results on metalanguage and reading, among them J. Downing, L. Ehri, L. Gleitman, 1. Mattingly, and E. Ryan, and it also was about that time that people were becoming aware of E. Markman's...

An appreciation of temporal and logical relationships is one of the essential and defining features of human cognition. A central question in developmental psy chology, and in the philosophical speculations out of which psychology evolved, has been how children come to understand temporal and logical relationships. For many recent investigators, this question has been translated into empiri cal studies of children's acquisition of relational terms-words such as before, after, because, so, if, but, and or that permit the linguistic expression of logi cal relationships. In the mid 1970s,...

Lisa is 4 years and 5 months old and Giulia 3 years and 4 months. One morning, the girls' father is taking them to nursery school. L: ... e bravissima, ha riscaldato l'auto. E' bravissima, vera? In praising the sun for having warmed up the car, Lisa has referred to it in the feminine gender, as in the German die Sonne. Her father corrects her by using the masculine gender. F: E' bravissimo. E' if sale. L: E' un maschietto, if sale? (Is the sun a little boy?) F: E'maschife. (It's masculine.) G determined]: E' una femmina (No, it's a girl ) F: Forse in tedesco. (Perhaps it is in German.) is...

It is obvious that the growing child manifests an increasing understanding of his language and facility to use it. A major part of the child lan guage literature is concerned with the child's developing linguistic and communicative competence. Scattered evidence also shows, however, that children become progressively more aware of language as Zanguage. It is interesting to consider in what ways the internal structure and mechanisms of language become more accessible. Little is known about linguistic aware ness of this kind, the role it plays, or how it develops. When the new Projektgruppe fUr...

This volume contains the papers read at the conference on 'Semantics from different points of view' that took place at Konstanz University in Septem ber 1978. This interdisciplinary conference Vias organized by the': Sonderfor schungsbereich 99 - Linguistik' and sponsored by the Deutsche Forschungsge meinschaft. Li guists, philosophers, logicians, and psychologists met to dis cuss recent developments in the study of the semantics of natural language from the point of view of their disciplines. But this is not to say that there was one particular topic shared by all the participants. The...

Not very many years ago, it was common for language researchers and theorists to argue that language development was somehow special and separate from other aspects of development. It was a period when the "1 ittle 1 inguist" view of language development was common, and much discussion was devoted to develop mental "linguistic universals," in contrast to more broadly defined cognitive universals. It seemed to me at the time (and still does) that such views reflected more their promulgators' ignorance of those aspects of cognitive development most likely to provide illuminating parallels with...

This book deals with the conditions and the consequences of the production of different syntactic sentence structures. During the sixties the syntactic structure of sentences was one of the most intensively studied topics in psycholinguistic research. The dominant interest did not, however, lie in the function of syntactic structures but in the ability to understand and to utter them. Later, in the seventies the interest shifted to the semantic structure of sentences. Many studies centred around the structural aspects of the repre sentation of knowledge. The leading question was: how can the...

This volume is a revised and extended edition of Epistemische Bedeutung (Doherty 1985). The German and the English versions dif fer in a number of aspects, only two of which can be attributed to the difference between German and English: A number of com binatorial options of epistemic particles discussed in Epistemische Bedeutung have not been included in the English version, as the English-speaking reader may be expected to be more interested in the general aspects of the topic than in the specific properties of a class of linguistic entities which does not exist in English at all. The...

The written word has taught a way of being. Since the written version of language is visible and permanent, many of our attitudes to and normative assumptions about language - and human communication in general - derive from our experiences of written language. In recent years, scholars from such disciplines as history, anthropology, education and linguistics have joined forces to readdress issues surrounding the problems of the relationship between oral and written language. The lessons to be learnt are fascinating and imply that many of the assumptions we hold concerning language and the...