Susan Kemper A debate about the role of working memory in language processing has become center-most in psycholinguistics (Caplan & Waters, in press; Just & Carpenter, 1992; Just, Carpenter, & Keller, 1996; Waters & Caplan, 1996). This debate concerns which aspects of language processing are vulnerable to working memory limitations, how working memory is best measured, and whether compensatory processes can offset working memory limitations. Age-comparative studies are particularly relevant to this debate for several reasons: difficulties with language and communication are frequently mentioned by older adults and signal the onset of Alzheimer's dementia and other pathologies associated with age; older adults commonly experience working memory limitations that affect their ability to perform everyday activities; the rapid aging of the United States population has forced psychologists and gerontologists to examine the effects of aging on cognition, drawing many investigators to the study of cognitive aging. Older adults constitute ideal population for studying how working memory limitations affect cognitive performance, particularly language and communication. Age-comparative studies of cognitive processes have advanced our understanding of the temporal dynamics of cognition as well as the working memory demands of many types of tasks (Kliegl, Mayr, & Krampe, 1994; Mayr & Kliegl, 1993). The research findings reviewed in this volume have clear implications - for addressing the practical problems of older adults as consumers of leisure ti- reading, radio and television broadcasts, as targets of medical, legal, and financial documents, and as participants in a web of service agencies and volunteer activities.

Susan Kemper A debate about the role of working memory in language processing has become center-most in psycholinguistics (Caplan & Waters, in press; Just & Carpenter, 1992; Just, Carpenter, & Keller, 1996; Waters & Caplan, 1996). This debate concerns which aspects of language processing are vulnerable to working memory limitations, how working memory is best measured, and whether compensatory processes can offset working memory limitations. Age-comparative studies are particularly relevant to this debate for several reasons: difficulties with language and communication are frequently mentioned by older adults and signal the onset of Alzheimer's dementia and other pathologies associated with age; older adults commonly experience working memory limitations that affect their ability to perform everyday activities; the rapid aging of the United States population has forced psychologists and gerontologists to examine the effects of aging on cognition, drawing many investigators to the study of cognitive aging. Older adults constitute ideal population for studying how working memory limitations affect cognitive performance, particularly language and communication. Age-comparative studies of cognitive processes have advanced our understanding of the temporal dynamics of cognition as well as the working memory demands of many types of tasks (Kliegl, Mayr, & Krampe, 1994; Mayr & Kliegl, 1993). The research findings reviewed in this volume have clear implications - for addressing the practical problems of older adults as consumers of leisure ti- reading, radio and television broadcasts, as targets of medical, legal, and financial documents, and as participants in a web of service agencies and volunteer activities.

Language users have access to several sources of information during the build up of a meaningful construction. These include grammatical rules, situational knowledge, and general world knowledge. A central role in this process is played by the argument structure of verbs, which establishes the syntactic and semantic relationships between arguments. This book provides an overview of recent psycholinguistic and theoretical investigations on the interplay between structural syntactic relations and role semantics. The focus herein lies on the interaction of case marking and word order with semantic prominence features, such as animacy and definiteness. The interaction of these different sorts of information is addressed from theoretical, time-insensitive, and incremental perspectives, or a combination of these. Taking a broad cross-linguistic perspective, this book bridges the gap between theoretical and psycholinguistic approaches to argument structure.

The volume demonstrates the interdependence of man’s language capacity and his other conceptual capacities. This enables linguistic structures to be minimalised, and for extra-linguistic domains to provide much of the interpretations of sound and meaning. Underspecification is demonstrated in the word formation of Indo-European, Late Archaic Chinese and modern Khmer; on the word- and sentence levels by the event structures of German; and in the information structure predominantly of languages with the so-called free word order: German, Slavic languages, Arabic compared with English and the tone language Hausa. The volume is noteworthy due to the close cooperation between theoretical and experimental research. Within grammar, it has especially strengthened prosodic research and the syntax-phonology interrelations and their interpretations, and it has helped to create data bases for the relations within texts and to evaluate the findings.

The domain of Communication Disorders has grown exponentially in the last two decades and has come to encompass much more than audiology, speech impediments and early language impairment. The realization that most developmental and learning disorders are language-based or language-related has brought insights from theoretical and empirical linguistics and its clinical applications to the forefront of Communication Disorders science. The current handbook takes an integrated psycholinguistic, neurolinguistic, and sociolinguistic perspective on Communication Disorders by targeting the interface between language and cognition as the context for understanding disrupted abilities and behaviors and providing solutions for treatment and therapy. Researchers and practitioners will be able to find in this handbook state-of-the-art information on typical and atypical development of language and communication (dis)abilities across the human lifespan from infancy to the aging brain, covering all major clinical disorders and conditions in various social and communicative contexts, such as spoken and written language and discourse, literacy issues, bilingualism, and socio-economic status.

This book demonstrates that some properties of rightward movement phenomena (a cover term referring to sentences in which an element appears to be “displaced” to the right) may be derived from syntactic principles and interface conditions within the framework of the generative grammar/minimalist program. It also argues that certain properties, which up to now have been dealt with purely in regards to syntax, can be better accounted for in terms of language processing; accordingly, the human parser should undertake explanations of part of the competence system’s output. The volume’s analysis of rightward movement phenomena leads to the conclusion that phrasal rightward movement rules in syntax fail to follow specific principles. At first glance, this conclusion seems identical with Kayne’s (1994) claim that no rightward movement rules exist. However, this work provides completely different grounds for the absence of rightward movement rules, meaning that it presents an original view of rightward movement phenomena.