Predictions derived from an organizational interpretation of transfer in a part-whole free-recall paradigm were tested via a procedure which allowed manipulation of part- and whole-list organizational compatibility and extent of part-list organization. (Author/SW)

Three new experiments concerning the depth-of-processing view demonstrate that repetition at the phonemic depth of processing does facilitate memory, regardless of whether the repetitions are massed or distributed and regardless of whether the dependent variable is uncued recall, cued recall or recognition. (Author/RM)

Discusses a study that examines which combination of animate and inanimate actors (anyone or anything performing an action) and patients (the thing that is the object of action) two-year-olds view as prototypical. Results suggest that the actor category is usually acquired first for prototypical sentences with animate actors and inanimate…

Discusses two studies that examine whether children are sensitive to the fact that adjectives and nouns differ in the contrast they imply. Results show that by age four, children are sensitive to this. Implications for children's use of referential language and word learning strategies are discussed. (SED)

Describes a study that analyzes the naturalistic productions of "because" and "so" by 96 children, aged three-and-a-half to nine-and-a-half years of age, while narrating personal events. Analyzes results in terms of such factors as: correctness, types of causality, nature of actor/recipient, time of causality, producer, and linguistic issues. (SED)

Discusses experiments that investigated the sources of knowledge that are employed in spoken word identification. The interactive assumption that normal spoken word identification processes require the presence of semantic and syntactic context and the special status given to word-initial acoustic-phonetic information in cohort theory were…

Explores the concept of emergent literacy, discussing what children know about reading and writing, how they come to know it, and what this information means for classroom practices and school policy. (MM)

Presents a framework for relating degree of bilingualism to aspects of linguistic awareness. Found the more fully bilingual a child was, the better his or her performance on metalinguistic tasks requiring high levels of analysis of knowledge. (SKC)

If we want students to read for meaning, we must test patterns based upon both reader and text comprehension. Testing patterns will yield an understanding of the student's conceptualization of linked facts and the student's relative comprehension of those patterns to the text's macro-concepts. (Author/DJD)

A simulation model of episodic memory, MINERVA Z, is applied to the learning of concepts, as represented by the schema-abstraction task. The model successfully predicts basic findings from the scheme-abstraction literature, including some that have been cited as evidence against exemplary theories of concepts. (Author/LMO)

A model of information processing has been developed that combines concepts from the study of attention and the study of problem solving. The model has been realized as a computer program and used to simulate a variety of phenomena from the attention and performance literature. (Author/LMO)

Examines what is known about writing in both a first and a second language. Describes a study in which unskilled English as a second language writers in a "developmental" college writing course wrote an essay in class, compares the study's findings with the findings of some major studies of the writing process. (SED)

Describes a study which examines the relationship between context redundancy and keyword intelligibility in sentences having both high and low redundancy. Word pairs were placed in similar positions in two sets of sentences: sentence pairs that one might find in text, and adages together with sentences that might be spoken. (SED)

Describes a study of adult listeners' perceptions of infant babbling. Adult judges were unable to identify language background significantly above chance level. Findings do not support the babbling drift hypothesis which predicts that babbling begins to approximate characteristics of the mother tongue as infants approach meaningful speech. (SED)

Symbolic play and literate behavior involve similar mental processes: the production and comprehension of decontextualized language and narrative competence. Methodological and theoretical issues in recent studies are reviewed. Observational results support the theory of similar mental processes, but experimental results question a causal…