The nature of persisting spreading activation from list presentation in eliciting false recognition in the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm was examined in two experiments. We compared the time course of semantic priming in the lexical decision task (LDT) and false alarms in speeded recognition under identical study and test conditions. The…

This paper hypothesizes that Frank Buchman and Alfred Korzybski were aware of each other and made some comments--written or orally--about each other's work. Support for this hypothesis was developed by concentrating on correspondence, documents, and interviews relative to the two men. The paper also provides documentation about Buchman and…

Presents various arguments on the etymology of the Spanish word "trabajo" from several Latin antecedents. (CHK)

Discusses the logical approach to information retrieval that treats retrieval as inference, considers probabilistic models for text retrieval, and presents an approach for combining Datalog (a variant of Horn predicate logic) with probabilistic theory using intentional semantics with logical rules. Discusses syntax and semantics and compares this…

Latent semantic analysis (LSA) is an automated, statistical technique for comparing the semantic similarity of words or documents. In this article, I examine the application of LSA to automated essay scoring. I compare LSA methods to earlier statistical methods for assessing essay quality, and critically review contemporary essay-scoring systems…

Discusses three perspectives (linguistic, philosophical, and psychological) which emphasize the points of agreement rather than disagreement among different versions of a conceptually based theory of word meaning acquisition. (JMB)

Examines a number of specimen terms of interest to librarians in various languages with a view to establishing the degree of ambiguity inherent in them and the extent to which the connotation of apparent equivalents in other languages matches. (Author)

Examines the treatment of sense discrimination in eight Spanish/English English/Spanish bilingual dictionaries and one specialized dictionary. Does this by analyzing 30 words that Torrents des Prats determined have at least nine different sense discriminations from English into Spanish. Larousse was found to be far superior to the others. (SED)

Two studies used a comprehension task and an elicited production task to examine whether preschool children and adults appreciated the semantic properties of generic utterances. Findings indicated that in both tasks, 4-year-olds and adults treated generics ("bears live in caves") as distinct from both indefinites ("some") and universal quantifiers…

Free recall in adults with Asperger's Syndrome (AS) was compared with that in matched controls in an experiment including semantically similar, phonologically similar and unrelated word lists. Without supportive instructions, adults with AS were significantly impaired in their recall of phonologically and semantically related lists, but not…

This article tests the hypothesis that individuals with autism poorly encode verbal information to the semantic level of processing, instead paying greater attention to phonological attributes. Participants undertook a novel explicit verbal recall task. Twenty children with autism were compared with 20 matched typically developing children. On…

A strategy is presented for explaining (and discerning) subtle differences in two words that appear to be semantic twins in one context but are not interchangeable in another context. This strategy suggests the following: (1) list several phrases that contain one of the problem words, then swap the second word for the first; (2) examine the…

The two major schools of thought concerned with the meaning of proper names, i.e., the direct-reference or referrential/causal theory, and the description theory, are outlined, and new arguments are presented for a strong version of the second of these theories. The referential theory takes the meaning of the name as being the same as its…

Explores the idea that echoing in autistics differs from normal imitation and represents a different species of production. Subjects were five autistic children, ranging in age from 3 years 10 months to 6 years 8 months, and two normal children, aged 2 years 6 months and 3 years 11 months. (MP)

Subjects compared the magnitudes of pairs of concepts from the semantic orderings of time, quality and temperature. Results showed that the semantic representations of ordered terms contain subjective magnitude information. (Author/RM)