In a study of individual differences in long-term memory access, university undergraduates verified (1) whether an item was a member of a category; (2) whether two items belonged in the same category; and (3) whether two words had the same name. Reaction times from these tasks were correlated with verbal ability, as measured by performance on a…

A word association test was given in French to 76 girls learning French to determine whether their responses matched those given by native speakers. Three types of responses are possible in such a test: syntagmatic, where one word cues another that usually occurs with it ("bread" elicits "butter"); paradigmatic, which is of the same form class as…

A propositional network system for representing the logical and semantic information contained in a text is described. The reliability of scoring information recalled from reading, using this representational system, is found to vary with the scoring goal. Determination of the amount of information recalled is found to be extremely reliable. A…

This paper is a theoretical discussion of several functions of knowledge systems based on the idea of partial matching, that is, comparison of two or more descriptions by identification of their similarities. Several knowledge system functions are described in terms of partial or best matchings including analogical reasoning, inductive inference,…

The booklet discusses and reports on a study of elicited imitation as a vehicle for assessing the language-functioning level of echolalic autistic children. An historical overview is presented of the diagnosis of early infantile autism. The question of whether or not early infantile autism is a distinct syndrome is addressed. The theoretical and…

This paper suggests that some features of the syntactic and semantic structure of sentences sometimes influence the phonemic analyses assigned to stretches of speech by the perceptual system. It is argued that the role of higher-order levels of linguistic analysis in speech perception can be productively studied. Theoretical issues appropriate for…

THE CURRICULUM COMMITTEE OF THE MINNESOTA COUNCIL OF TEACHERS OF ENGLISH HAS COMPILED THIS ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY FOR THE TEACHER OF ENGLISH WITH LITTLE OR NO FORMAL BACKGROUND IN LINGUISTICS WHO WISHES TO "MAKE INTELLIGENT APPLICATIONS FROM LINGUISTICS IN HIS GENERAL TEACHING OF ENGLISH." THE ENTRIES HAVE BEEN SELECTED FOR THEIR GENERAL…

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…