Descriptions of educational practice offer an array of important, but typically hidden dimensions of meaning which provide potentially rich resources for understanding the practices. This paper illustrates: (1) how analysis, interpretations, and assessments interpenetrate what appear to be descriptions and suggest how readers can tease out these…

A study of conceptual and relational responses of subjects when recalling the semantic content of a text they have just heard. Responses can be overgeneralized and inferred. Responses studied reflect processes of adjustment during acquisition of information and the processes occurring during recall. (SC)

IN ANTHROPOLOGICAL STUDIES THE TECHNIQUE OF COMPONENTIAL ANALYSIS (TAKEN FROM THE FIELD OF FORMAL SEMANTICS) IS APPLIED TO A SET OF TERMS WHICH FORM A CULTURALLY RELEVANT DOMAIN. THIS METHOD PROCEEDS BY RECOGNIZING SEMANTIC DISTINCTIONS (COMPONENTS) WHICH APPORTION THE TERMS OF THE SET INTO CONTRASTING SUB-SETS SUCH THAT EVERY ITEM IS…

This experiment tested the hypothesis that cognitive change resulting from information inputs can be represented as linear motion of concepts in multidimensional space. The theoretical background is reviewed and the mathematical derivation of the hypothesis is given. A set of fifteen nations was scaled by 64 undergraduate and graduate students in…

Using reaction time, the interaction between stimulus sentences requiring varying degrees of inferential activity and tasks requiring different levels of cognitive processing is investigated. Effects of thematic and nonthematic contexts are also examined. Results suggest that analyses of processing time may provide useful insights into the…

Two pilot studies are presented in the context of a discussion of the interpretation of anomalous sentences. In the first study, it was shown that naive language users differ in their judgments of the interpretability of semantically anomalous sentences; in the second, that they coincide in their ranking of the appropriateness of various contexts…

This study investigated the role of semantic variables, derivable from multidimensional scaling, in search and decision processes. (Author/RM)

This study examined the ability of 4-year-old children to understand the propositional components (presuppositions and assertions) of semantically complex propositions and to deduce what such components together imply. (BRT)

Response to article Development of the ability to encode within evaluative dimensions,'' Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 1972, 13, 210-19. (EJ 053 728). (CB)

Research supported by research grants from the Canadian Defense Research Board and the Canada Council. (VM)

In the experiments reported here grammaticalness and meaningfulness were found to be of much greater significance than word frequency, interword association or syntactic frame in the comprehension of deviant sentences. (Author/FWB)

Six different categorization tasks were studied in an investigation of the effects of semantic relatedness on categorization performance. An intersection model is proposed to account for the findings, which are generally inconsistent with decision-bias theories and with simple versions of spreading activation theory. (Author/PN)

Two experiments were undertaken to evaluate the influence of automatic semantic processing of pictures on word judgments. Results indicated that (1) perceptual factors influence responding in these types of tasks, (2) picture processing can facilitate word processing in some circumstances, and (3) incompatible background pictures can interfere…

Two experiments studied how people determine relationships among family members. In one experiment, subjects were to determine relationships in hypothetical families. In the second, the families were in the subjects' experience. It was determined that memory was organized in terms of parent-child relations together with knowledge of which members…

Examines the claim that transformational rules are psychologically real, and applies this claim to all aspects of transformational grammar. (AM)