Three experiments were conducted to assess the effects of nonbizarre vs. bizarre pictorial elaboration on the paired-associate retention of noun pairs. Five and seven year old children served as subjects in the first two experiments and learned a list of common noun pairs by the study-test paired-associate method. Experiment 1 provided a…

The present study was conducted in order to evaluate pictorial elaboration effects in children's incidental paired-associate memory. The design of the experiment consisted of a 2 x 2 x 2 x 5 factorial with (1) grade level (kindergarten vs. second), (2) pictorial presentation (standard vs. elaborated), (3) list (two 14-pair lists of common noun…

Thirty college undergraduates participated in a study of the effects of acoustic and visual interference on the recall of word and picture triads in both short-term and long-term memory. The subjects were presented 24 triads of monosyllabic nouns representing all of the possible combinations of presentation types: pictures, printed words, and…

Twenty college students, ten each in the experimental and control groups, were the subjects of an experiment designed to demonstrate that integration of verb meanings occurs in connected discourse. Six paragraph-length stories, each of which included one or two critical sentences containing a general verb, were presented orally to the subjects.…

A preliminary study was conducted to identify the precipitating conditions and strategies used for vocabulary acquisition and to relate these findings to one theory of elementary and post-elementary cognitive development. Twenty-six college seniors were asked three questions regarding precipitating conditions and strategies used for vocabulary…

A decline exists in children's ability at ages 4 and 5 to accurately respond to the difference between polar adjectives such as "big" and "tall.""Taller" and "bigger" are both taken to mean "having a higher top point," rather than "bigger" meaning "greater overall mass." Two hypotheses are put forth to explain this. The "strong cognitive…

A discussion of the functions of human communication shows that underlying them is the cognitive process by which people have the ability to take the view of others, to internally represent reality, and to take into account knowledge and experience to choose future actions. These features of decentration and abstraction reveal the link between…

Three experiments were conducted to test the psychological relevance of objectively quantified word collocations. The first experiment showed that perceived frequency of word combinations roughly followed the objective count. Another recurrent quality of words, constructional tendency, was supplemented as independent variable in the two following…

Individuals previously identified as language-bound (LB) and language-optional (LO) participated in a series of experiments to study verbal fluency. The two groups showed a striking similarity in the number of responses they produced for categories with constraints at various levels (word form, word content, sentence, interpretation). This…

This report describes a study conducted to discover whether children with language delay would respond differently from normal children on two identically itemed tests of knowledge of adjectives and prepositions, one of which using objects as stimuli and the other using pictorial stimuli. It was hypothesized that the test using objects would be…

This study is designed to investigate the relationship between the extent of visualization of poetically elicited mental images (V) and five other variables involved in response to poetry: extent of verbal interpretation of the meaning of poetry; extent of recall of poetry; accuracy of recall of poetry; extent of liking of poetry; and level of…

This paper is primarily concerned with Basil Bernstein's sociolinguistic account of school failure. The first section describes some earlier work relevant to his theories. In the second section, Bernstein's sociolinguistic codes thesis is described, and an attempt is made to show that it suffers from the merging of two logically distinct strands…

Three extrinsic factors were manipulated in a problem-solving task performed by 80 ten-year-old children of I Q 90-110. The factors were: the presence or absence of the name of the concept given in feedback, specific instructions, and whether the child was allowed to verbalize. The task was a modification of Vygotsky's experiment on concept…

This paper analyzes a typical school spelling task in terms of an information processing model of spelling performance. Based on principles embodied in a computer simulation program previously reported (SPEL by Simon and Simon) the model proposed here has been expanded to try to account for many more kinds of student error than were possible with…

The verbal interactions of eight mother-child pairs (four Hebrew-speaking mothers and four English-speaking mothers with their 24-month-old language learning children) were recorded and analyzed to determine the frequency of occurrence of various interrogative forms in the mothers' language. Results indicated that English-speaking mothers produced…