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This article seeks to explore lexical processing in an agglutinative language and the organization of the lexicon. From the point of view of lexical processing the major empirical question that arises in relation to agglutinative languages is whether the morphologically complex words are represented in a holistic or a morphologically decomposed form in the mental lexicon and whether lexical access requires some form of morphological parsing of the word. In this article several possible models are being differentiated. These include holistic word entries, separate morphemic entries, and serially specified morphemic entries. It also briefly reports some preliminary results from two pilot studies which bear on the validity of these models. Both experiments examined the lexical processing of morphologically simple and complex Hungarian words using different on-line techniques.

The paper presents the results of two experiments performed on Hungarian preverbal modifiers. This hypothetical grammatical concept includes such categorically different morphemes as verbal prefixes, objects with no article, nominal parts of complex predicates etc. They are all supposed to attach more directly to the verb than other moveable elements and to have a prototypical preverbal position. Both experiments tried to find psycholinguistic evidence for this privileged relationship between the verb and the preverbal modifiers and for their preferred ordering. In the first study adults had to provide pairwise word-relatedness judgements in a scaling task. The main results suggested that most of the proposed modifiers indeed have a privileged connection to their verb even if they are separated from the verb in the surface string. However, semantic relatedness also had an effect on the judgements. In the second experiment preschoolers participated in an elicited imitation task repeating sentences with the preverbal modifiers in preverbal or postverbal positions. In general, there was a strong tendency to redress the structures to the canonic form with preverbal modifiers in the immediately preverbal slot. In sum, the experiments give some psycholinguistic support for the intimate relationships between the preverbal modifiers and the verb and for their privileged position. The actual list of modifiers needs further clarification in consonance with the development of grammatical theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents the author's opinion on the book "Brain Language," which takes a critical look at the metatheoretical assumptions of several contemporary research fields in order to provide a provocative framework. Information on the Cartesian approach used in the book; Suggestions on how to overcome recent conceptual difficulties in dealing with the intricacies of the human mind; Debate on cognitive and linguistic models of the language.

This paper examines the role of word order in the sentence interpretation of Hungarian children. The concept of perceptual strategies and its equivalents have been used more and more in the psycholinguistic literature. Among the many proposed strategies, one of the widest possible scope is the Noun-Verb-Noun strategy suggested by Thomas Bever. Bever has found that in the acquisition of English, the strategy is being formed and overgeneralized around four years, causing a systematic misinterpretation of passive sentences and some cleft constructions. A clearer "first noun is the agent" strategy was obtained from children showing no signs of the assymetry. Studies with Hungarian children are especially well suited to probe some of the issues involved. The case system clearly marks grammatical relations, while word order does not carry information about the roles of noun phrases as arguments of the verb. In studying sentence interpretation of Hungarian preschool children, the author aims to gain some hints on whether children tend to take order as a marker of basic relations like agency as well as on the course of differentiation between topic, agent and surface subject.

The article deals with the tendency of the Hungarian language community to focus on stigmatization and hypercorrection. These tendencies are strong compared to most modern European language communities but not unlike some other East European language communities that are characterized by a relatively late coalescing of vernacular languages into a national language and the national into the official one. In the Hungarian sociolinguistic situation hypercorrection trends are evidently related to the efforts on the part of the school and the language cultivators to stigmatize certain forms as belonging to a substandard, uneducated language variety. Language cultivation refers to the organized efforts to keep the integrity of language from deterioration due to laziness, due to foreign influence, and due to a decrease in carefulness and to negligence. These efforts have their own scientific organization and publication organs and a large impact in schools, and they also receive extensive coverage in the media. This is an important factor because it means a large segment of the Hungarian population is constantly exposed to the norms advocated by them. On the part of educated speakers and the language cultivators there is a conscious effort to overcome the simplification processes. This rejection of neutralizations and simplification becomes social stigmatization in this process because less educated and less urbane speakers in general do not make use of this extra effort needed to overcome their natural tendencies.