A cued recall study and a semantic verification study with individuals with mental retardation (n=93) found that increasing the degree to which the words in sentences were semantically related increased subjects' ability to utilize contextual information in sentences to essentially normal levels. (Author/DB)

Mildly retarded adolescents (N=33) were assessed on the nature of the memory representation that underlies ability to remember single sentences. The cued recall procedure reflected a difference in the degree to which mentally retarded and nonretarded individuals construct sentence representations that more precisely specify sentence meaning…

Analyzes the theoretical and the epistemological assumptions of information science. Topics include users and cognition; subject analysis; methods of classification; composition, semantics, and retrieval; the meaning of information; the typology of documents; information selection and research evaluation; and information specialists and…

Illustrates use of Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) for predicting coherence through reanalyzing two studies that manipulated coherence of texts and assessed readers' comprehension. Finds that LSA predicts effects of text coherence on comprehension. Notes that LSA can be applied as an automated method that produces coherence predictions similar to…

Investigated the influence of morphologically complex and simple words on the production of morphologically complex and simple picture names in five picture-word interference studies. Two variants of picture-word interference were employed to separate morphological from semantic and phonological effects. (Author/VWL)

Responds to an article that argues that in the study of bilingualism, conceptual representations should be treated as related but not equivalent to word meanings, as knowledge-based, dynamic and language- and culture-specific. (Author/VWL)

Generation effect (generated words are better memorized than read words) of anagrams, rhymes, and associates of target words was examined in young, elderly, and very old subjects. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that only young subjects benefit from the generation effect in a free-recall test when the rule is of a phonological nature. Experiments 3, 4,…

Event-related potentials were recorded to substantiate the claim of a distinct psycholinguistic status of (a) pronouns vs. proper names and (b) ellipses vs. proper names. In two studies 41 students read sentences in which the number of intervening words between the anaphor and its antecedent was either small or large. Comparing the far with the…

College students learning about language and using this knowledge to learn how to teach reading and writing should participate in strategies that simulate systems in the language and strategies that they in turn will use in their own classrooms. Cognitive and constructivist strategies are interactive and thus more powerful than the traditional…

Simple name-retrieval models of spoken word planning (Bloem & La Heij, 2003; Starreveld & La Heij, 1996) maintain (1) that there are two levels in word planning, a conceptual and a lexical phonological level, and (2) that planning a word in both object naming and oral reading involves the selection of a lexical phonological representation.…

Cognition-related brain responses to meaningful and meaningless figures were registered in 5-year-old kindergarten children who either had been subtyped as being at-risk of developing an L- or P-type dyslexia (LAL versus LAP) or who were not at-risk. While identifying, naming, or categorizing pictures, event-related potentials (ERP) were…

Lately, many studies have suggested that communication impairments in brain-damaged individuals might be explained--at least in part--in terms of cognitive resource allocation. Reproducing a clinical pattern in normal subjects by using a dual-task treatment might be a way of evaluating the role of cognitive resources in the right hemisphere's…

This book discusses the act of understanding in mathematics. The first chapter, "Understanding and Meaning," inquires into the various senses and uses of the word "understanding" in ordinary language and discusses the notion of meaning and relations between understanding and meaning. The second chapter, "Components and…

Research on the cognitive processes used in semantic priming has shown that the processing of a given stimulus is speeded by prior processing of a related stimulus as the result of automatic and/or effortful priming. To investigate the effect of age on semantic priming, two independent studies were conducted at Pomona College in California and at…

Research is reported which explores the viability of theories of sentence memory in describing adjective memory. (Author/RM)