High school students read textual passages organized around a semantic, temporal, or random theme. Free recall, semantically, and temporally-cued tests measured recall. During free recall, the organized passages yielded greater recall. For the cued tests, more words were remembered when the passage organization matched the type of test cue.…

Three groups of children, aged 5, 7, and 11 years, were tested in a clause-memory task, in order to investigate the role of syntactic and semantic factors in children's recall and processing of spoken continuous prose. (Author/SW)

Discusses the rules governing the usage of the indefinite article in Spanish. (HP)

A free association technique was used to investigate the semantic structure of three forms of encoding: verbal, visual imagery, and kinesthetic imagery. Discusses the relevance of these findings to creativity and the concept of semantic memory. (Editor/RK)

A description of research in education for communication with specific reference to the native (French) language class. Linguistic mastery is the ability to adapt the language to various situations. The pedagogical implications of research in the relationship between types of communication and linguistic structure are immense. (Text is in French.)…

Three investigations of preschool children's comprehension of "younger" and "older" are discussed. Results suggest children focus on height in their initial hypotheses about meanings of the terms, ignoring age or function cues. These and findings about acquisition of antonyms are discussed in terms of recent theorizing about lexical-meaning…

Children's understanding of the nature of polar terms and comparative terms between the polar opposites is discussed. (CHK)

Diary observations of two-year-olds' over-extended word use have been interpreted as arising from the word's underlying semantic feature structure. This interpretation was rejected after a study of five children. The need to construct models of early word meaning reflecting certain early language development patterns is discussed. (CHK)

The comprehension ability of 36 children at three stages of telegraphic speech was assessed using active behavioral responses to declarative and imperative sentences. A significant increase in verbal and behavioral appropriateness with age was found for imperative and declarative forms. Results are compared with Shipley, Smith and Gleitman's…

It has been demonstrated that instructions to learn have no effect on immediate recall in the incidental learning paradigm used by Jenkins (1974). This research further investigated this finding by factorially manipulating recall instructions (incidental vs. intentional learning), presentation rate of materials, retention interval, and type of…

Compares semantic uses of mental state words by children four and a half to five years old. Suggests that children's linguistic and cognitive capacities can be influenced a great deal by subtle situational factors and that the effects vary according to the child's cultural background. (AEW)

Zwicky's analysis of syntactic notions as possible candidates for "head," based on constituent-structure theory, is discussed in detail. This analysis is contrasted with the results gained form one provided in a dependency-based theory in which "head" is the name of a grammatical relation category. (Author/LMO)

Three experiments explored the development of formal logical reasoning between Grades 4 and 12 and the role of semantic content in the solution of Wason's (1966) selection task problems. Results suggest that formal logical reasoning is not generally present during the fourth or sixth grades and that formal logical competence becomes available in…

Undergraduates (N=75) did semantic differential ratings on four pictures: a male or female in a "masculine" or "feminine" stance. The "masculine" stance was perceived as more masculine, potent, happy, and well-adjusted than the "feminine" stance. Cross-sex-typed males were rated less favorably and cross-sex-typed females more favorably than their…

Investigation of two- to four-year-olds' (N=20) understanding of temporal terms indicated that children were more likely to understand sentences using simple tasks, materials, and commands than more complicated sentences used in previous research. (Author/CB)