A model of natural language generation based on an underlying language-free representation of meaning is described. A computer implementation of this model, called BABEL, has been developed at Stanford University. It is able to produce sentence paraphrases which demonstrate understanding with respect to a given context. Available from Association…

This research characterizes how the mental lexicon functions during sentence processing. In sentence processing, access of meaning is seen to be dependent on interaction between syntactic and semantic information within the sentence. It had been previously thought that meaning had been located in an independent mental lexicon. Three experiments…

This paper looks into the question of the relationship between language and thought, and in particular, various theories advanced by Soviet psychologists. These theories are to be viewed within the context of the Soviet ideological legacy which proclaims that ideas do not exist apart from language. The current Soviet position can be summarized as…

Following reading and listening tasks, adult long-term memory is high in semantic information and low in syntactic and lexical information. Comprehension during reading and listening must depend to some extent, however, on short term retention of linguistic information that is less abstract and shares more features of the input than the semantic…

While semantic development has been alleged to proceed slowly, reading instruction begins early in the child's school career. Yet, little research has been addressed toward understanding how beginning readers extract meaning from the printed word. This paper reports two experiments that measured latencies in a picture-word interference task to…

The author calls attention to a basic split between perception and cognition that psychologists or linguists tend to make either explicitly or implicitly. There is some psychological evidence to substantiate, at least for higher developmental levels, the functional importance of this split. The chief problems for psycholinguistics which arise out…

Early childhood learning of language has led some to postulate innate knowledge of an abstract symbolic linguistic system. However, if the child's abstract understanding initially requires concrete support in the form of agreement of the message with his nonlinguistic experience, the indication would be that the development of syntactic…

Research in bilingualism has shown that the balance between a bilingual's two languages is rarely even and that there is something special about the mother tongue. Theories concerning separate storage of the two languages and first language primacy predict that: (1) the meanings of translation-equivalent words are not identical, and (2) the…

Two experiments examined the comprehension of singly and multiply negated sentences. Difficulty of comprehension was measured by the speed and accuracy with which subjects judged the semantic reasonableness of sentences. Marked and negatively prefixed adjectives were a particular focus of the study. (Author/RM)

The principal recent models of semantics, conceptual, and lexical memory are explicated and criticized. A description of long-term is developed in terms of these models. (Text is in French.) (DB)

Working from theories of text grammar and logic, the authors suggest and tentatively confirm several hypotheses concerning the role of micro- and macro-structures in comprehension and recall of texts. (Text is in French.) (DB)

Reports on two experiments which question the assumption that semantic processing is superior to nonsemantic processing, and which demonstrate that effective semantic elaboration cannot be equated with the quantity of semantically congrous information. (Author/AM)

A study of the effect of lexical items within first sentences which affect reading expectations for the remainder of the passage, and of the effects of violation of reader expectation following first sentences, showed poorer performance by low achievers on the "violating" passage and a performance increase with familiar content regardless of a…

Two experiments examined the roles of semantic and surface information in reading and recognizing sentences. Results indicate that reading and recognition are interactive processes, involving conceptually driven and data driven operations; the interaction may be either automatic or controlled. Semantic and surface information are conceptualized as…

Begins by discussing a number of problems in applying a levels-of-processing approach to memory as proposed in the late 1960s and then revised in 1972 by Craik and Lockhart, suggests that some of the basic assumptions are false, and argues for information-processing models devised to study working memory and reading, which aim to explore the…