Examines private speech utterances to understand children's verbal self-guidance during school task performances. Finds cognitive and metacognitive private speech utterances indicated children's approach to task performance; children with higher metacognitive levels of private speech were better able to self-regulate school tasks; and children's…

Category-specific disorders are frequently explained by suggesting that living and non-living things are processed in separate subsystems (e.g. Caramazza & Shelton, 1998). If subsystems exist, there should be benefits for normal processing, beyond the influence of structural similarity. However, no previous study has separated the relative…

In the present study, we looked at cross-modal priming effects produced by auditory presentation of morphologically complex pseudowords in order to investigate semantic integration during the processing of French morphologically complex items. In Experiment 1, we used as primes pseudowords consisting of a non-interpretable combination of roots and…

When does morphological decomposition occur in visual word recognition? An increasing body of evidence suggests the presence of early morphological processing. The present work investigates this issue via an orthographic similarity manipulation. Three masked priming lexical decision experiments were conducted to examine the transposed-letter…

Two experiments are reported in which subjects judged whether pairs of words viewed simultaneously contained the same stem morpheme. Reaction times for making these judgments are discussed. (Author/RM)

Research is reported investigating the processes involved in rejecting certain false categorical statements. (RM)

This experiment was designed to investigate the possibility that young children use syntax to constrain and focus verb meanings in their interpretations of novel scenes and novel verbs. Subjects were 24 children, 12 males and 12 females, of 23 to 27 months, all raised in English-speaking homes. Their mean productive vocabulary was 240 words. A…

Inference is discussed as a factor in the derivation of non-explicit antecedents and referents for three types of discourse anaphora: definite pronouns, "one"-anaphora, and verb phrase ellipsis. This derivation process is seen as being part of the normal process of text-understanding. It is claimed that the use of non-explicit…

Three pairs of spatial antonyms (higher than/lower than, above/below, and rising away from/falling away from) were used in a task in which subjects judged whether a sentence accurately described a previously presented pictorial relationship. Subjects' reaction times were used as the dependent measure. Since all three word pairs were used…

A hypothesis based on the psycholinguistic derivation of sentences was tested. The task required that sentences temporarily stored in memory be transformed and spoken with delayed auditory feedback. Available from Plenum Publishing Corp., 227 W. 17th St., New York, NY 10011. (Author/RM)

This article discusses an attempt to establish a model of the cognitive strategies used by a child in the acquisition of nouns and the stages in the process of categorizing reality. (Text is in Italian.) (CFM)

An experiment tested the hypothesis that the memory representation of a text is a hierarchical structure in which information is ordered from most important to least important. Sentences that tested topic information were verified faster and more accurately than sentences that tested detail information. (Author/RM)

Describes experiments that examined the effects of orthographic similarity on lexical decisions and compared decision times to words when they are preceded by unrelated words. Results indicate that lexical decisions about spoken words were shown to be influenced by the spelling of an immediately preceding item. (SED)

Suggests that a factor underlying the complex analysis of prose is amount of elaboration. Reports findings of two experiments supporting this idea. (FL)

This article describes an experiment which explores the relationship between the interval between the two occurrences of the repeated item to be recalled and the memory for the repeated item, and argues that both spacing and lag effects are dependent upon factors associated with study-phase retrieval. (CLK)