The contrasting views of Saussure and Bloomfield ("mentalist" versus "mechanist"), the hypotheses of Whorf showing the influence of language on certain habits of thought, and Chomsky's notion of generative transformational grammar in the context of language use are reviewed. The author notes the limits of these systems and suggests that in dealing…

There is a growing belief among educators that parents can make an influential contribution to their children's educational opportunities by working with them on the development of certain skills in the years before the initiation of formal schooling. This parents' handbook attempts to supply a mixture of general principles and specific practices…

This paper reports on the results of several experiments concerned with instructions to forget certain information and to remember other information presented in the context of a variety of laboratory tasks of short-term memory. Assessment of the retention of remember material indicated that it varies directly with the degree to which clear…

The purpose of this paper is to examine the function of memory as an underlying psychological process in human communicative behavior by offering a theoretical framework derived from communication literature. Divided into two sections, the paper deals with "The Psychology of Memory: Some Basic Propositions," which reviews the literature on the…

The author reviews the literature and makes tentative conclusions concerning the physiological correlates of learning and memory. Particular attention is given to the issues of spinal cord learning, subcortical learning, cerebral cortex learning, localization of learning within the brain (specificity vs. non-specificity), and association areas…

This study used five cueing systems composed of 16 cues each in combination with three topical areas to form cue-topic pairs which acted as stimulus items for the retrieval of naturally stored information. The five cue systems were composed of: randomly selected words, randomly selected nouns, the Wilson and Arnold system, a modification of the…

This study investigated the facilitative effects of the loci system using mental imagery for acquisition and recall within a retroactive inhibition (RI) paradigm. Fifty-five college undergraduates were randomly assigned to five treatment conditions. Four groups formed cells in a 2x2 factorial design which included (1) an RI factor (AB-AD vs.…

This issue contains five articles dealing with several aspects of linguistic theory. The first, "Origine et evolution de la notion de 'situation' de 'l'Ecole linguistique de Londres': de Malinowski a Lyons," examines the origin and meaning of the concept of "situation" in articles by the London school of linguists. The second, "Some Aspects of a…

The primary purpose of the present study was to compare three measures of recognition memory. One hundred and forty-four high school students were instructed to study silently 36 CVCVC verbal units (target items) at a 4-sec. rate of presentation. The Ss were then given one of three tasks which required them to identify target items from among…

In three experiments undergraduates were presented with eight adjective-noun phrases within a paired-associate list context in the orders adjective-noun and noun-adjective and instructed that either word would be given as a cue for recall. The same phrases were presented within a prose context where recall was tested by the cloze procedure. In the…

The effect on reading speed of the number of target items being searched for and the number of target occurrences in the text was examined. The subjects, 24 college undergraduate volunteers, were presented with a list of target words, and then they read a passage for comprehension which contained occurrences of the target words (Experiment1) or…

The experiments discussed in this report do not have a direct relationship to each other but represent work on a series of sub-issues within the general framework of visual processing of information. Because of this discreteness, the report is organized into a series of papers. The first is a general review of tachistoscopic work on iconic memory…

The study was designed to developmentally assess the effect of relational imagery training, unitized pictorial relations, and the combination of both on the recall of noun triplets by 120 first, third and sixth graders. In the unitized picture condition, relations were imposed by the experimenter, whereas the relational imagery training condition…

The question of how people learn and remember information from complex written materials is explored by means of Grime's semantic grammar of propositions and the author's analysis of the content structure of prose. This paper, presented at the 1973 Interdisciplinary Meeting on Structural Learning, first discusses such elements of the semantic…

The present study attempted to identify and describe individual differences in concept learning. It was hypothesized that if a significant portion of the reliable individual variation in a complex learning situation could be identified and described, it would be reasonable to expect that subsequent predictions could be made about the conditions…