Results in Experiment I contradict certain predictions regarding the effect of presentation time on nominal and functional serial-position curves. Experiment II indicates that differences between nominal and functional curves are not an artifact produced by item selection. (Author/RM)

An experiment tested the hypothesis that the memory representation of a text is a hierarchical structure in which information is ordered from most important to least important. Sentences that tested topic information were verified faster and more accurately than sentences that tested detail information. (Author/RM)

A theory for representation of concepts in memory is proposed which emphasizes the association of salient exemplars with the concept. Previous theories dealing with the classification processes involved in acquiring new concepts have shown that clear category boundaries do not exist. It is proposed that present theory must account for the…

Norms of free association to common ambiguous English words are reported. Responses were categorized on the basis of sense relevance. On this basis, the sense dominance of the words was quantified, and the degree of ambiguity associated with each word estimated by the information measure U. This publication will be of interest primarily to…

A Markov model was proposed to account for the short-term retention of the spatial arrangement of letters. The model was fit to three spatial location recall conditions in experiments which differed in distractor task. The rate of information transfer from primary to secondary memory was affected by changes in distractor task. (SW)

The results of two experiments indicate that the two phonological properties of a word, its initial phoneme and length, strongly influence the latency to detect a target phoneme which begins the following word. Studies showing increased detection latencies following ambiguity are analyzed. (SW)

Ordering preferences for English adjectives in attributive (prenominal) and predicative (postnominal) positions were found to be in general agreement. Semantically congruent and incongruent adjectives were compared regarding ordering preferences and a "borrowing" theory is proposed. (CHK)

An experiment was carried out to study the processes of linguistic memory. Subjects were asked to read aloud brief prose passages and repeat what they had read. The "deviations" from the original passages were analyzed to determine the time of the deviation, during decoding or recall. (Text is in Italian.) (CFM)

To show the organization of recall, items that are remembered together can be written on the same line of a two-dimensional (2D) grid. Such 2D recall does not induce the clustering it reveals. Various aspects of 2D recall and the clustering it reveals are discussed. (Author/RM)

A technique that can be used to study the effects of low-level, rote, repetitive (Type I) rehearsal is introduced and validated. The technique is then used to investigate the relationship between the amount of Type I rehearsal and recognition memory performance. (Author/RM)

In the present study, in which narrative passages were divided into linguistic subunits and these subunits measured for their structural importance, it was determined that the structural importance of the units was related to recall. (FWB)

Five experiments are described which examine how polysyllabic words are stored and retrieved from lexical memory. The first four experiments look at interference effects caused by the accessing of inappropriate lexical entries. The fifth reveals that frequency of the first constituent of a compound word influences classification times. (CHK)

Spaced presentations of 12- and 15-word lists were better recalled when no task or an easy task intervened between presentations. Results indicate a lack of generality in Bjork and Allen's 1970 findings and a need for a two-factor theory of the spacing effect, and are evidence for a spacing effect. (CHK)

Evidence supports the hypothesis that visual word recognition may involve recoding into phonemic form. Less pronounceable nonsense words are recognized as nonsense faster than those more pronounceable. Differences in pronounceability may produce their effects during sequencing of neural instructions of each phoneme. (CHK)

The author examined relationships between message organization, message uncertainty, and verbal learning. Message organization was manipulated by varying the distance between repeated subject-verb-object triples in a sequence of sentences. Message uncertainty was defined as the uncertainty (variability) of word selections for subjects responding…