New analytical techniques were developed for the identification of subject groups based on within-subject patterns of cooccurrences of responses. These “response coincidence analyses” provided an empirical basis for conjectures about stages or strategies in terms of the rules which characterize group performances. The nature of the operative rules was inferred from an analysis of item response similarities within the subject groups. These techniques were applied to a data set originally obtained by Innes (1974) from 120 children (20 at each age from 2 to 7 years), for a study of the acquisition of the English inflectional morphology for pluralization. The results show quite clearly how the pluralization system is acquired and indicate how such data can be used to develop the specification of rules sensitive to psycholinguistic evidence.

Two studies investigated use of an elicited imitation task to encourage the production of semantic relations by 20- to 28-month-old children. In both studies, a model repeated sentences containing target semantic relations several times, accompanied by three-dimensional props to aid the children's memory and to provide context for their language. Results suggested that even the youngest children could be motivated to imitate, and that the elicited imitation technique was particularly successful in increasing the frequency of certain semantic relations that tended to be infrequent in spontaneous speech. Elicited imitation may thus be advantageous over spontaneous speech sampling because it allows greater experimenter control over contextual variables than is possible in most naturalistic settings.

This study examines the relationship between the production and perception of English /r/ and /l/ by native Japanese adults learning English in the United States. For some subjects, production of the contrast was more accurate than their perception of it, replicating and extending a previous finding reported by Goto (1971) in Japan. The difficulty in perception of the liquid contrast varied with its position in the word. Prevocalic /r/ and /l/ in consonant clusters yielded the greatest perceptual errors, while word-final liquids were accurately perceived. This pattern of errors is not predictable on the basis of contrastive phonological analysis, but might be the result of acoustic-phonetic factors. Implications for second language pedagogy are discussed.

Comprehension of six dimensional adjectives was found to be intact in groups of left hemisphere-damaged, right hemisphere-damaged and neurologically normal patients. Phrases with those adjectives were interpreted quite differently by left hemisphere-damaged patients than by the other two groups, and a subgroup of left-damaged patients appeared to be responsible for that group's deviant responses to phrases such as slightly bigger. All patients in the left-damaged group had some difficulty with negative phrases such as not big, however. Patients with right hemisphere-damage had difficulty interpreting only negative phrases with small. Results are interpreted with reference to Luria's discussion of semantic aphasia, and with regard to recent findings concerning the role of the right hemisphere in language comprehension.

Naming disorders of aphasic patients have generally been considered as resulting from an impairment of the ‘peripheral’ mechanisms connecting the central semantic system with the cortical structures subsuming perceptual and motor operations.

In recent years, however, some investigators have suggested that semantic-lexical disorders of aphasic patients may be due to a disruption of the semantic system itself. The results of some personal investigations supporting this last view are reported and two alternative (or complementary) interpretations are advanced to explain the central semantic disorder of aphasic patients. These interpretations assume: (a) a disruption of the information stored in each semantic representation; (b) a disorganization of the mechanisms subsuming semantic storage and semantic retrieval.