This study tested the ability of two semantic-memory models, feature-comparison and network, to explain differences in information processing times. The feature-comparison model assumes that an item's meaning is held in semantic memory as a set of characteristic and defining features, while the network model assumes that semantic memory is…

Two fundamental assumptions guide this survey of recent research on anaphora. The first is that anaphoric expressions do not refer to segments in a text or discourse, but to entities that are assumed to be in the language receiver's mind. The second assumption is that a text serves to suggest the referents for anaphora, as does the nonlinguistic…

It is suggested that twin discourse functions are served by thematization and topicalization, the former providing stable referential focus and the latter providing momentary referential focus. (Author/AM)

A study was conducted to find a manipulation that could be performed on a text (roughly analogous to real instructional material) which would lead readers to process that text more efficiently. One-hundred five college students were placed into either an experimental or a control group. Students in the control group were given an unchanged version…

THIS PAPER IS AN EXPLORATION OF THE DEGREE TO WHICH THE COGNITIVE CAPACITIES OF HUMAN BEINGS, AS DELINEATED BY PSYCHOLOGY, ARE SEEN TO BE CONGRUENT WITH THE FINDINGS OF LINGUISTIC RESEARCH, AND SOME SPECULATIONS ABOUT THE POSSIBLE IMPLICATIONS FOR LINGUISTIC RULES THAT MAY BE DISCOVERED THROUGH AN EXAMINATION OF PSYCHOLOGICAL PERFORMANCE. IT IS…

In a study of individual differences in long-term memory access, university undergraduates verified (1) whether an item was a member of a category; (2) whether two items belonged in the same category; and (3) whether two words had the same name. Reaction times from these tasks were correlated with verbal ability, as measured by performance on a…

A word association test was given in French to 76 girls learning French to determine whether their responses matched those given by native speakers. Three types of responses are possible in such a test: syntagmatic, where one word cues another that usually occurs with it ("bread" elicits "butter"); paradigmatic, which is of the same form class as…

The purpose of this study was to determine if the Bransford and Franks linear effect is or is not a function of semantic integration. The subjects were 32 volunteers from two undergraduate psychology courses at the University of Georgia. Stimulus materials consisted of four meaningful (M) complex embedded English sentences and four meaningless…

This report reviews the psychological and psycholinguistic literature from the last decade that deals with memory for sentences. It is concluded that the encoded representation of a sentence reflects both syntactic and semantic content, with the semantic content being far less transient. (Author)

In bilingual education programs, instruction may be (1) "less-than-half," in which instruction is mostly in English except for such subjects as social studies and native language arts; (2) "half-and-half," in which instruction is half in the student's language, half in English; or (3) "more-than-half," which provides instruction entirely in the…

Section I of this report discusses the theoretical issues relating to the development of syntax recognition routines based on psychological models of human speech recognition and reviews the relevant psychological literature. The research reported deals with attempts to relate various syntactic variables to measures of the perceptual complexity of…

The purpose of this study was to determine if children given spatial relationship training had learned a definition and/or conceptualization of "in front" which was limited to two distinctly different classes of objects functioning in a specific relationship. Twenty-one children who had completed the "in front" training were given three sets of…

Three experiments investigated the hypothesis that, when interpreted in context, general terms are typically encoded on the basis of an instantiation. The results indicated that a particular term naming the expected instantiation of a general term was a better cue for the recall of a sentence than the general term itself, even though the general…

This study investigates acquisition of two aspects of the meaning of color terms: semantic organization and reference. A longitudinal, repeated measure design was used, and data were collected from 33 subjects, 2 to 4 years old at first testing. Four tasks were used: one to assess semantic organization (the acquisition of the…

Methods of mapping cognitive structure were compared. Free and controlled word association tests and a tree-construction test were administered to graduate students. Very similar patterns of relations among words and graphic representations of these structures were produced. No agreement among the individual measures of concept interconnectedness…