Experiments conducted to find ways of teaching two and three year olds mathematical concepts were found to have general implications for concept learning. The failure of an initial attempt to teach the concepts "fat" and "skinny" led to a design of instructional procedures that would utilize a concept's name while trying to teach its semantic…

The effects of semantic (S), orthographic (O), and unrelated (U) verbal stimuli on word retrieval were examined. S stimuli inhibited locating items within categories, whereas U stimuli inhibited locating the appropriate category. The discrepancy between the present outcome and the previous finding of S prime retrieval facilitation is discussed.…

The syntagmatic paradigmatic model is a distributed, memory-based account of verbal processing. Built on a Bayesian interpretation of string edit theory, it characterizes the control of verbal cognition as the retrieval of sets of syntagmatic and paradigmatic constraints from sequential and relational long-term memory and the resolution of these…

This review of literature in linguistics and the psychology of language focuses on studies produced from 1961 through 1963. Such topics as language development, generative grammar, semantics, and the role of linguistics in the teaching of reading are covered, and much attention is given to the areas of verbal learning and the psychology of…

Phonetic symbolism implies that there are intrinsic relationships between sounds employed in words and the meanings of the words. Research in phonetic symbolism and how it operates has implications for foreign language learning. Such research seeks to determine whether one's capacity for correctly guessing the meanings of words in another language…

Overviews of schema theory, which focuses on the cognitive operations engaged in by the reader, and discourse analysis, which focuses on structural characteristics of the text itself, are presented in this paper. The first section explains the notion of cognitive schemata (patterns of expectations that are applied to incoming information) and…

This report provides a nontechnical summary of a series of studies from a research project with three major foci: memory storage dynamics, memory retrieval dynamics, and coding in semantic memory. A theory of forgetting was developed, involving time and interference factors. Memory traces have two properties: strength and fragility. Consolidation…

When two adults read eleven paragraphs, assigned a meaning to the target word in each paragrah, and answered questions about their strategies for dealing with the difficult/unknown words, they exhibited four strategies, outside of actual definition, that skilled readers use to deal with such words. The most often used strategy is paragraph…

Time-of-day effects on children's incidental visual memory for words and ability to solve verbal analogies were investigated. Thirty-six normal, learning disabled, and educable retarded children were assigned morning or afternoon learning/recall sessions. All showed afternoon superiority for superficially processed words, but no differences for…

Tested the hypothesis that individual differences in immediate-verbal-memory span predict success in second-language vocabulary acquisition. In the two-session study, adult subjects learned 56 English-Finnish translations. Tested one week later, subjects were less likely to remember those words they had difficulty learning, even though they had…

This discussion of verbal communication seeks to bring a new "unity" and order into the study of linguistics, to make linguistics truly an interdisciplinary science, and to communicate more effectively with the outside world, peopled by those who do not speak linguistic jargon. The particular linguistic problem here is an exploratory…

The range of meanings of "big" and "little" that mothers and their three children under age two expressed in relatively natural communication situations was studied. Longitudinal data from transcripts of conversations of middle-class mothers and their children were analyzed along with diary records kept by parents of their children's use of size…

Focusing on research about children's acquisition of reading and spelling skills, this paper discusses the larger picture of reading acquisition, issues addressed by research, and results of this research. The paper cites numerous studies on the subject, including studies on whether environmental print experiences enable young children to process…

Sixty-five grade 5-6 children were tested on a verbal recall task involving material of varying semantic and syntactic content. There was no difference between best and poorest readers in their performance on random lists of words, but there were clear differences on meaningful sentences and on syntactically well-formed but semantically anomalous…

A previous study found that middle-class Hebrew-English bilingual children were characterized by distinctive perceptual strategies and more advanced processing in certain verbal tasks, as compared to similar monolinguals. The present study tested whether similar strategies and response patterns will appear when the children involved are from…