A polemic is made for frame semantics and the linguistic phenomenon of anaphoric reference without noun phrase (NP) antecedent is examined within this frame. Non-syntactic anaphora is that which does not point out into the real world but rather points back into the discourse in a frame which has been built up between the speaker and hearer in a…

Fourth grade students' miscues occurring in signaled sentence combining exercises were compared with their reading miscues in a study relating cognitive style to miscue analysis of reading and writing. The records of 16 students were used, with reflective students and impulsive students so designated on the basis of their miscues per one-hundred…

This guide provides an overview of the language process, with sections focusing on the physiological aspects (organization of the brain), language development, environmental variables, cognition, language deficits and evaluation, language remediation, and implications of the reading process. Appendixes provide selected listings of developmental…

This research examines how semantic information influences syntactic parsing decisions during sentence processing. In the first experiment, subjects were presented lexical strings having syntactically identical surface structures but with two possible underlying structures: "The children taught by the Berlitz method," and "The…

The future of information resources management requires new approaches to implementing systems which will include a type of data base management that frees users to solve data processing problems logically by telling the system what they want, together with powerful non-procedural languages that will permit communication in simple, concise…

A study is described which examined the retrieval of regular and irregular past tense verbs. Results suggested that preterites such as "taught" are not stored as separate and independent lexical units but are formed from the verb stem by means of derivational rules. (Author/RM)

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)

An experiment is reported which shows that with identical preceding context, the same initial phoneme targets contained in high transitional probability words were responded to significantly faster than those in low transitional probability words. The result argues for the importance of transitional probability as an independent variable in…

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)

Investigated three aspects of children's early language knowledge: (1) comparison of preschoolers response to written stimuli in familiar environmental contexts (on signs and billboards) with responses presented in a traditional reading task format; (2) developmental changes in preschoolers' knowledge of written language; and (3) preschoolers'…

The conversion model of formal reasoning was examined for its ability to predict the decisions made by college students when solving concrete and abstract syllogisms. Results supported the model's contentions that reasoner's decisions reflect natural language processes in the encoding of syllogistic premises, and follow rationally from…

Four stories were divided into function word units; a dozen variables were all found to be statistically significant predictors of recall. For the more structured stories, subjects' intuitions, gist, and redundancy were the best predictors; for the less structured stories, serial position and repetition were best. (EJS)

An experiment tests conjectures that right ear advantage (REA) has an auditory origin in competition or interference between acoustically similar stimuli and that feature-sharing effect (FSE) has its origin in assignment of features of phonetically similar stimuli. No effect on the REA for acoustic similarity, and a clear effect of acoustic…

Discusses two major questions in the study of reading Chinese characters from the viewpoint of experimental psychology: (1) Is there cerebral lateralization? (2) In progressing from the recognition of single characters to the comprehension of sentences, is phonetic recoding necessary? The answer to both is yes. (KM)