Word learning studies traditionally examine the narrow link between words and objects, indifferent to the rich contextual information surrounding objects. This research examined whether children attend to this contextual information and construct an associative matrix of the words, objects, people, and environmental context during word learning.…

This study aims to determine the changes in the cognitive structures of the 35 participants after ecology-based nature education in Bursa Uludag and its vicinity. This study used a single group pretest-posttest experimental mode where the data was collected by a word association test. It included the key concepts of nature, national parks,…

Unexpected outcomes can reflect noise in the environment or a change in the current rules. We should ignore noise but shift strategy after rule changes. How we learn to do this is unclear, but one possibility is that it relies on learning to learn in uncertain environments. We propose that acquisition of latent task structure during learning to…

This article argues that, across different psychological contexts, the methods of data collection, treatment, and analysis in word association tests have hitherto been inconsistent. We demonstrate that this inconsistency has resulted from inadequate control, in previous studies, of certain important variables including the basis of norm…

This study measured responsiveness to the immediate environment on the basis of the social (vs. neutral) content of a person's free associations, in an effort to relate this responsiveness to field-dependence. The results lend support to the view that field-dependence is associated with social responsiveness in word association. Two aspects of…

THE WORD ASSOCIATIONS OF URBAN SLUM CHILDREN, BOTH NEGRO AND WHITE, WERE STUDIED TO DETERMINE WHAT IMPACT EXTREME SOCIOECONOMIC STATUS DIFFERENCES HAVE ON LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT. THIS STUDY OF CHILDREN FROM THE LOWEST EXTREME OF THE SOCIOECONOMIC SCALE WAS MADE AS A FOLLOWUP TO AN EARLIER STUDY OF CHILDREN REPRESENTING VARIOUS CULTURAL AND…

Investigated the premise that differences in developmental patterns as recorded on a scored biodata form are related to differences in verbal behavior as evidenced in six protocols derived from responses to the Kent-Rosanoff Word Association Test. Subjects were 110 female college students. (SDH)

In our concern to improve the quality of reading, we have neglected vocabulary development; in our zeal to teach children to pronounce words, we have neglected teaching them word meanings. Vocabulary can be developed by using all the communication processes: reading, writing, speaking, listening, visualizing, and observing; and vocabulary deserves…

Used a new statistical procedure to examine consensual beliefs about situations common to universities. This approach aims at constructing a joint hierarchical or non-hierarchical classification of situational categories. Results indicate that a psychologically meaningful and methodologically satisfactory representation of the cognitive…

Representational competence refers to the individual's capability to respond appropriately to external representations. For example, a child engaged in a grouping task may collect together all like objects even if the group contains varying representations of the object, including (1) the object itself, (2) a three-dimensional likeness of the…

Because socialization in terms of language behavior is the pivot for all other socialization, great emphasis is being placed in the linguistic determinants of cognition, and the influence of parents' language on child language and cognition. The same life conditions that foster dialect differences may be presumed to lead to semantic differences.…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 25 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: reading achievement as it relates to child dependency, the development of phonological coding, short-term memory and associative learning, variables available in…