THIS PAPER DEALS WITH THE SEMANTIC PHENOMENA WHICH UNDERLIE THE SURFACE STRUCTURE OCCURRENCE (OR NONOCCURRENCE) IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD OF ENGLISH NOUNS OF SUCH ITEMS AS THE DEFINITE AND INDEFINITE ARTICLES AND THE PLURAL SUFFIX. THE INFLECTION OF ENGLISH NOUNS IS DISCUSSED IN SEMANTIC TERMS. RULES ARE GIVEN FOR THE GENERATION OF THESE INFLECTIONS IN…

The author considers controversial psycholinguistic problems in the study of first and second language acquisition, raising such questions as whether all children learn language in the same way, and whether all languages are learned in the same way. Her observations, based partially on observing her own bilingual child, suggest that the cenematic…

According to the author, most grammarians have been writing stratificational grammars without knowing it because they have dealt with units that are related to one another, but not simply as a whole to its parts, or as a class to its members. The question, then, is not whether a grammar is stratified but whether it is explicitly stratified. This…

The study analyzes, for readability and difficulty, the language of 50 commonly used application forms. The forms were compared with respect to length, readability, t-unit density, and word-length variables. Forms were also compared against two word-frequency lists. Results show that many of the words appearing often on forms do not appear on the…

The effect on comprehension of words containing more than one meaning was studied. In experiment one, subjects in grades four, five, and six were assessed on their ability to recall polysemous words and identify their meanings after having read them in sentence contexts. When words were assigned their primary sense in the sentences, subjects…

Osgood, Suci, and Tannenbaum in their work with the semantic differential developed a technique with which data from an individual could be represented by a three-dimensional model. The model is derived from distance scores based upon profile ratings of concepts such as mother or self, on subscales such as kind-cruel, weak-strong, etc. Osgood…

Intended as a survey of the use of "weasel words" (a term coined by Theodore Roosevelt to mean an equivocal word intended to deprive a statement of its force), this book discusses these words both as a part of the historical process of language change and as a misleading and confusing element in current media. Humorous in tone, the book presents…

The ten papers in this volume are largely revisions of papers presented at the Texas conference, held March 22-24, 1973. The first paper, "Against Universal Semantic Representation," by Gilbert Harman, argues against the need for (and the possibility of) a level of semantic representation in a theory of language. "Remarks on the…

Research was conducted to investigate two general classes of human attention models, early-selection models which claim that attentional selecting precedes memory and meaning extraction mechanisms, and late-selection models which posit the reverse. This research involved two components: (1) the development of simple, efficient, computer-oriented…

The perceptions of three groups (n=30) of bachelor level special education majors and doctoral candidates in education toward the mentally retarded and various other exceptionalities were measured after exposure to three types of treatment. Of the three groups, the control group received no treatment, experimental group I received negative…

The purpose of this study was to determine if the Bransford and Franks linear effect is or is not a function of semantic integration. The subjects were 32 volunteers from two undergraduate psychology courses at the University of Georgia. Stimulus materials consisted of four meaningful (M) complex embedded English sentences and four meaningless…

The third volume in this series on Serbo-Croatian-English contrastive analysis contains three articles. They are: "Recent Approaches to Grammar and Their Significance for Contrastive Structure Studies," by Rolf Berndt; "Some Remarks on the Factive and Non-Factive Complements in English and Serbo-Croatian," by Ljiljana Bibovic; and "On Conjoined…

In this study, 50 infants (15 to 18 months of age) were shown four different film sets in an effort to determine (1) whether infants can perceive action role reversals between an actor and recipient of the action when the direction of the action is ruled out as a cue and (2) whether infants consider only animate objects to be potential…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of point of view on attitude in literary response. Subjects were tenth-grade students who read on grade level and who had successfully completed all average ninth-grade English requirements. Attitudes toward the study concept of mental illness were measured by a semantic differential.…

In an information-processing approach to language processing, language processing is viewed as a sequence of psychological stages that occur between the initial presentation of the language stimulus and the meaning in the mind of the language processor. This book defines each of the processes and structures involved, explains how each of them…