Investigates potential causes of decrements in children's understanding of the words "big" and "tall" by comparing results of studies of English-speaking children and results of a study of Arabic-speaking children. (Author/RH)

Discussion of the use of information retrieval techniques for automatic generation of semantic hypertext links focuses on automatic text summarization. Topics include World Wide Web links, text segmentation, and evaluation of text summarization by comparing automatically generated abstracts with manually prepared abstracts. (Author/LRW)

The trend toward use of corporate language in campus management coincides with, and may correspond to, a decline in collegiality and the unique qualities of academic life. (MSE)

Analyzes features of the Swedish language from the viewpoint of mono-and cross-language information retrieval. Results of a comparative study that tested the degree of lexical ambiguity in Swedish, Finnish, and English suggest that part-of-speech tagging might be useful in Swedish information retrieval due to the high frequency of homographic…

The hypothesis that Alzheimer's disease (AD) degrades semantic representations predicts that AD qualitatively alters spontaneous thoughts. In two experiments contrasting free associations to words with strong (e.g., "bride-groom") versus weak (e.g., "body-leg") associates participants with AD produced less common responses (e.g., "bride-pretty")…

Using Osgood's Semantic Differential, responses of Chicanos and Anglos on 5 concepts viewed as basic to the Mexican family structure were examined. The 5 concepts were self, mother, father, female, and male. (NQ)

Many educational and psychological survey questionnaires contain item response categories which may have different meanings to different people. Students who had previously answered Pace's College Student Experiences questionnaire by checking one of four response categories (i.e. never, occasionally, often, very often) were selected to obtain a…

Glass and Holyoak (1975) have raised two issues related to the distinction between set-theoretic and network theories of semantic memory, contending that: (a) their version of a network theory, the Marker Search model, is conceptually and empirically superior to the Feature Comparison model version of a set-theoretic theory; and (b) the contrast…

The purpose of this study was to (1) compare the semantic relationships among common nouns obtained via two different measurement procedures and (2) determine if the use of these relationships to classify the various words results in differential degrees of learning when the stimuli are cast in terms of the paired-associate learning paradigm.…

A short description of the wide variety in the listing of compound prepositions in most dictionaries. A few suggestions for systematization are made. (AMH)

A study determined what types of speech act five- to 13-year-olds and adults would define as "promising." Results indicate that children could distinguish between "promising" and "predicting" in terms of the speaker's responsibility for the outcome. (Author/CB)

Investigates the effect of presentation context, taxonomy, and age of child on mothers' choices of category names in object-naming tasks. Contextual factors had a primary role in determining mothers' selections of category names, and the three independent variables had a complex and dynamic effect on mothers' naming practices. (Author/CI)