In recognition memory, anything that is objectively new is necessarily not-old, and anything that is objectively old is necessarily not-new. Therefore, judging whether a test item is new is logically equivalent to judging whether it is old, and conversely. Nevertheless, a series of 10 experiments showed that old? and new? judgments did not produce…

Language and culture endow humans with access to conceptual information that far exceeds any which could be accessed by a non-human animal. Yet, it is possible that, even without language or specific experiences, non-human animals represent and infer some aspects of similarity relations between objects in the same way as humans. Here, we show that…

The goal of the present study is to understand the role orthographic and semantic information play in the behavior of skilled readers. Reading latencies from a self-paced sentence reading experiment in which Russian near-synonymous verbs were manipulated appear well-predicted by a combination of bottom-up sublexical letter triplets (trigraphs) and…

Participants read lists of words and then made recognition judgments to pairs of words, each of which consisted of a prime word and a test word. At issue was the effect of a semantic relationship between the prime word and the test word on the recognition judgment to the test word. Under standard recognition conditions, semantic priming impeded…

The present study replicated the procedure of Kausler et al. (1975) as a means of testing further the hypothesis that the processing of wrong items differs qualitatively, as well as quantitatively, from the processing of right items. (Author)

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…

Reports three experiments to investigate differences in the semantic classification of pictures and words. The data suggest that visual short-term memory and semantic memory operate in semantic-decision tasks though these sources of information differ in characteristics, potential for activation, and level of abstraction. (PMJ)

Four experiments investigated activation of semantic information in action preparation. Participants either prepared to grasp and use an object (e.g., to drink from a cup) or to lift a finger in association with the object's position following a go/no-go lexical-decision task. Word stimuli were consistent to the action goals of the object use…

Comparison between relational concepts and word definitions coincided with lower levels of thinking, and abstract definitions with the highest level. (Author)

Results of three experiments provided no substantial evidence of selective encoding. (Authors/MB)

Nonsense forms with nonsense labels were utilized in a match to sample task to observe whether children's word extensions are based on static form characteristics or on functional action characteristics. The stimuli consisted of: (1) a single model object which performed an action; (2) a selection array consisting of one object similar in form to…

Experiments conducted to find ways of teaching two and three year olds mathematical concepts were found to have general implications for concept learning. The failure of an initial attempt to teach the concepts "fat" and "skinny" led to a design of instructional procedures that would utilize a concept's name while trying to teach its semantic…

This paper examines the perceptual processes that underlie normal language acquisition with relation to perceptual dysfunctions in the aphasic child. Experiments are cited which seem to indicate that auditory dyfunctions may underlie language impairment. Experimental studies of the linguistic systems of the aphasic child seem to support the theory…