A study on sentence processing involving rehearsal, response initiation, and mental transformation required the subject to perform a secondary task concurrently with transformation of a sentence previously given. A secondary task interruption technique was used to allow inferences as to where the planning occurs by measuring increases in task time…

Many researchers have assumed that adult bilinguals have separate systems for their two languages. Such an assumption raises interesting questions about how the two languages are acquired in the case of a child learning two languages simultaneously. This study attempts to determine whether the two languages are acquired separately right from the…

The question of whether word meanings have internal structure identical in kind to the syntax of sentences is examined. Evidence is sought for the structural aspects of word meaning and the issue of whether judgements of similarity between words is based on meaning content or on meaning structure is raised. Four hypotheses were tested: (1)…

Analysis of the questions asked by normal children suggests that there are cognitive stages of question development. Samples of spontaneous questions asked by normal children and linguistically deviant children were compared in this study in order to determine if linguistically deviant (aphasic) children suffer primarily from a syntactic…

The purpose of these studies was to test the hypothesis that thematization affects the probability that a probe word will produce meaning-preserving recall of a sentence that is part of a discourse. Sentences were constructed along the lines of subject-verb-object and were presented in three experiments: free recall of isolated sentences, prompted…

Two studies were carried out demonstrating the interaction of intonation grouping and meaning relations between words in free recall. When the intonation grouping is in phase with the word relations, recall is facilitated. When it is out of phase, recall is lowered. (Author/RM)

Two detection experiments were conducted with short lists of synthetic speech stimuli where phoneme targets were compared to syllable targets. Results suggest that phonemes and syllables are equally basic to speech perception. (Author/RM)

In a modification of the sentence-picture comprehension task (Chase & Clark, 1972), 70 university undergraduates verified sentence-picture pairs. The findings limit the generalizability of any linguistic comparison model; two different comprehension strategies were used consistently by different subjects, whose choices of strategy were predictable…

Investigates the relationship between memory for prose and the structural characteristics of the semantic representation proposed by Kintsch. Results extend the generality of Kintsch's model across a wide range of ages, and indicate that a proposition is more likely to be recalled when its superordinate is also recalled. (EJS)

An experiment is described that involved presenting sentences to the subject for study and then testing single words for recognition (the subject had to decide whether the test word was in one of the study sentences). A large priming effect was obtained. (Author/RM)

It was hypothesized that if the episodic structure of a story determines subjects' organization of that story in memory, then variation in structure should affect the organization of information in recall. (Author/NCR)

French sentences with a long ambiguous word just before a target phoneme led to faster reaction times than did sentences with a short unambigous word just before the target phoneme. (Author/SW)

How a child answers questions provides information about how he or she processes input. A child's early responses to questions at age one year, three months, were compared to her responses at one year, seven months, when she was in the two-word stage. (SW)

Twelve one-word-stage children were given minimally contrasting two-word instructions. Since non-linguistic cues were eliminated, comprehension involved making non-syntactic inferences from the word combinations. The children could respond correctly to some of the instructions, and even carried out some unfamiliar activities. (Author/SW)

A description of a series of six experiments dealing with human memory processes. They examined the types of codes generated in maintenance rehearsal and the effects of rehearsal time at various single levels of encoding. Data confirmed earlier findings and led to conclusions regarding repetition, encoding and levels of processing. (AMH)