At the Toronto Toy Fair of 1990 a new children’s play product was introduced by its creator, Toni McKee. She got the idea from her university class in which she studied different types of chemical suspensions. One such suspension had molecules that would bind to a certain extent yet come apart easily, melting into a liquid when it was handled. “I got the idea of making it into a children’s toy,” McKee stated (BC Woman, October, 1990, p. 13). McKee soon found business partners, consulted with chemists, and came up with a toy which she named GUK. Later McKee assigned her rights for GUK to Pyewacket Enterprises, Inc. of Canada, which registered it with the US Patent and Trademark Office on February 5, 1991 as a powdered mixture, which, when mixed with water, becomes a tactile substance for entertaining and educating children.

Individual differences in phonologicalsensitivity are among the most powerfulpredictors of early word decoding ability and adeficit in phonological sensitivity is thoughtto be the primary stumbling block for thosechildren who have difficulty learning to read. However, only recently have researchers begunto search for the potential causes andcorrelates in phonological sensitivitydevelopment. In the present one-yearlongitudinal study, the influences of speechperception, oral language ability, emergentliteracy, and the home literacy environment(HLE) on the growth of phonological sensitivitywere examined in a group of 115 four- andfive-year-old children. When the variables wereentered simultaneously into a multipleregression equation, emergent literacy, orallanguage, and the HLE contributed significantunique variance. However, when theautoregressor was controlled, only phonologicalsensitivity at Time 1 and HLE contributedsignificant unique variance to predictinggrowth in phonological sensitivity. Resultsare discussed in terms of their implicationsfor the education of preschool as well asschool-aged children.

This chapter addresses the balance of storage and computation in the mental lexicon for fully regular and productive inflectional processes in Dutch. We present evidence that both regular inflected nouns and regular inflected verbs show clear and robust effects of storage, but that at the same time on-line parsing also plays a role. We argue that the balance of storage and computation cannot be predicted on the basis of economy of linguistic description. Instead, a range of cognitive and linguistic factors are crucial determinants.

We describe a part-of-speech tagging system specially designed to tag Spanish texts using small linguistic resources. Nevertheless, the tagger obtains encouraging results. We have found and exploited useful contextual parameters to tag ambiguous and unknown words. Our tagger is mainly supported by word lists and one corpus with around 10⁴ words. The system has been tested for texts of the so called “news” genre and is still on continuous development.

It is argued, contra Beck and Rullmann (1999), and with Heim (1994), that the sources of strongly exhaustive interpretations and `de dicto' interpretations of wh-complements of veridical question-embedding verbs are one and the same. Beck and Rullmann's theory is shown to predict certain `de dicto' readings which do not exist, while a particular rendition of Heim's theory is shown to constrain the generation of `de dicto' readings in the correct way.