There have been some suggestions in linguistics and cognitive science that humans process continuous speech by routinely chunking it up into smaller units. The nature of the process is open to debate, which is complicated by the apparent existence of two entirely different chunking processes, both of which seem to be warranted by the limitations of working memory. To overcome them, humans seem to both combine items into larger units for future retrieval (usage-based chunking), and partition incoming streams into temporal groups (perceptual chunking). To determine linguistic properties and cognitive constraints of perceptual chunking, most previous research has employed short-constructed stimuli modeled on written language. In contrast, we presented linguistically naïve listeners with excerpts of natural speech from corpora and collected their intuitive perceptions of chunk boundaries. We then used mixed-effects logistic regression models to find out to what extent pauses, prosody, syntax, chunk duration, and surprisal predict chunk boundary perception. The results showed that all cues were important, suggesting cue degeneracy, but with substantial variation across listeners and speech excerpts. Chunk duration had a strong effect, supporting the cognitive constraint hypothesis. The direction of the surprisal effect supported the distinction between perceptual and usage-based chunking.

Vivian Zamel and Ruth Spack have collected papers spanning 19 years of discussion on teaching academic literacy, offering an illuminating journey through the issues. In a postmodern spirit, the editors emphasize the multiplicity of literacies and the value of students' own ways of knowing. The question arises, though, why this should be specifically taught by applying a particular pedagogical model, because it appears to be a normal part of any intellectual process to fall back on previous knowledge and experience when faced with a new task. Indeed, weeding it out would seem a bigger problem, should anyone want to accomplish that. The recognition and appreciation of students' previous experiences and earlier knowledge is nevertheless welcome, and there are a few well-chosen papers narrating personal experiences of struggle between different cultural identities and logics. Yet many of the papers in this volume, particularly in its first half, tacitly seem to assume that English is the language of the world and that the North American context equals universal. Much of the discussion is dominated by a controversy between discipline-specific (genre-based or disciplinary community-based) and expressive writing, or, perhaps, rather a crusade against genre-based teaching, given that proponents of this orientation have not been given voice. From a North European perspective, this bifurcation into two opposing camps seems hard to comprehend—many of us have happily combined genre analysis, analysis of cultural differences in rhetoric, and critical discourse analysis with a view of writing as process and discovery.