Reaction time to verify property statements was examined in the context of two semantic distance factors--typicality of the category member in the subject of the statement, and dominance of the category member's property in the predicate. (Author/NCR)

Describes 35 Foreign Language and Area Research awards funded by the U.S. Office of Education. The $900,000 provided for these programs was intended to stimulate and strengthen the teaching of foreign languages and related courses in area studies, including assessment studies, research in teaching methods, and development of curricular materials.…

Brown addresses Schonbach's criticism (previous article) of Brown's tribute to Lenneberg (Cognition, June 1976). Brown reviews various research on codability, recognition, and memory of color names; and encourages the development of new generalizations. Although Whorfian hypotheses are appropriate for studying semantic differences, they have not…

An investigation was conducted to determine the effect of vowel environment on consonant durations in the speech of 10 normal-hearing, 10 hearing-impaired, and 10 deaf adult male speakers. The deaf do not appear to learn the influence of vowels on consonant duration, as does a normal-hearing population. (Author/SW)

Discusses the responsibility of the university to research and teach about uses of language by doctors, lawyers, government bureaucrats, and others in order to control rather than communicate. (DD)

Presents a case study in which the use of intricate varieties of levels of honorifics in Japanese is more complicated than traditional sociolinguistics has shown. The buraku (Japanese barrio) treated here is situated in the west part of Honshu, Japan, and consists of 13 households. (CHK)

Two experiments that study subjects' memory for active and passive sentences are reported. A reaction time methodology is used to measure subjects' memory for verbatim information about the sentence. Retention of verbatim information displays traditional short-term versus long-term discontinuity. (CHK)

Results of this experiment suggest that specific encoding of a word is not a necessary condition for cue effectiveness. Results imply that the effect of a nominal fragrance cue arises through the mediation of a functional, implicitly generated semantic cue. (Author/SW)

A report on a study in which twenty adults were tested for their ability to reproduce accurately the articulatory and prosodic features of three languages in which they had received instruction. The goals were to partially test the "critical period for language learning" and the acquisition of a nativelike accent. (AMH)

Kuczaj challenged the hypotheses that young children construct utterances by applying transformation rules to an abstract underlying structure. It is contended that Kuczaj's alternative hypotheses do not account for Hurford's data, and some of Kuczaj's new evidence actually supports the Transformational Hypothesis. (SW)

A preliminary study dealt with the ways in which children between six and seven years of age organize spoken language, specifically aspects of the temporal and segmental structure of polysyllabic English words containing the syllable C/jul/ (e.g., pediculous). (Author/SW)

The Bransford and Franks paradigm for the study of semantic integration is called into question. Three experiments are described that test the hypothesis that this paradigm produces its results by creating confusion and interference. The results call for continued search for a paradigm relative to the study of integration. (AMH)

A description of four experiments confirming the theory that recall of a given item from a semantically categorized list is impaired by the presence of other items from this same category. This inhibitory effect of part-set "cuing" is interpreted here as a cue-overload effect. Selected references are included. (AMH)

The introduction of laboratory computers has facilitated investigation of quantitative theories in the investigation of memory. Data from a recent qualitative study was used to test two quantitative theories. The strength-resistance theory fitted the data quantitatively without significant deviations. Statistical tables and references are…