The game "Giant Steps" was described. It was designed to aid children in the semantic development of verbs. The purpose of the experimental evaluation was to determine whether playing the game actually did influence the associative structure of those verbs and adverbs that are "guessed" words in the game. Third graders from two classrooms in an…

Subjects compared the magnitudes of pairs of concepts from the semantic orderings of time, quality and temperature. Results showed that the semantic representations of ordered terms contain subjective magnitude information. (Author/RM)

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…

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)

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)

Two experiments explore the activation of semantic information during spoken word recognition. Experiment 1 shows that as the name of an object unfolds (e.g., lock), eye movements are drawn to pictorial representations of both the named object and semantically related objects (e.g., key). Experiment 2 shows that objects semantically related to an…

Verifying simple sentences generally involves a process wherein the meanings of individual words are combined to form the meaning of the entire sentence. Three experiments are described in which the combination process was investigated by asking subjects to decide whether S-V-Adj-O sentences were true or false. (Author/RM)

Meyer found subjects were faster to determine if a stimulus word was a member of either of two prespecified categories if the categories were close in meaning. A reanalysis of the data favors instead a model emphasizing the role of decision-making processes in categorization and flexibility of task strategies. (CHK)

A model is proposed in which information processing is accompanied by dynamic processes, including the reorganization of items into active patterns and their subsequent displacement. Research using category names and instances showed that reaction times decreased with each successive repetition under one condition, but longer latencies were…

Examines the inhibition of recall of list items when extralist items are introduced, and describes experiments which suggest that this is an expression of a more general inhibition phenomenon. (Author/AM)

Two experiments examined the comprehension of singly and multiply negated sentences. Difficulty of comprehension was measured by the speed and accuracy with which subjects judged the semantic reasonableness of sentences. Marked and negatively prefixed adjectives were a particular focus of the study. (Author/RM)

Experiment I studied type of processing (semantic or nonsemantic) and dimension of rating (pleasantness or frequency of occurrence). Recall was higher under semantic conditions and after ratings of pleasantness. Experiment 2 showed that the difference between incidental and intentional learners increases as more stress is placed on the learning…

Levels of processing were manipulated as a function of acquisition task and type of recognition test in three experiments. Experiment I showed semantic acquisition to be superior to rhyme acquisition given a standard recognition test, whereas rhyme acquisition was superior given a rhyming recognition test. Results are interpreted and discussed.…

Two experiments were conducted to test how readers process unattended words in a display and how the semantic category of these flanking words affects response time. (Author/AM)