This document presents a study of natural language understanding of computer programs. In the study, the performance of IRUS, a natural language query system designed to interface with a database, was compared with the performance of preschool and early elementary school children in answering questions about a specific database. Questions used in…

Although research in episodic recall memory, comparing younger and older adults, favors the younger adults, findings in semantic memory research are less consistent. To examine age differences in semantic and episodic memory recall, 72 young adults (mean age, 20.8) and 72 older adults (mean age 71) completed three memory tests under varied…

Although role or perspective taking has been considered important for the development of mature social thought and behavior, and training for perspective taking has been used to remediate deficient behavior, few studies with either normal or disturbed populations have examined naturally occurring behaviors expected to correlate with…

A lexical representational analysis of Classical Arabic is proposed that captures a generalization that McCarthy's (1979, 1981) autosegmental analysis misses, namely that idiosyncratic characteristics of the derivational binyanim in Arabic are lexical, not morphological. This analysis captures that generalization by treating all the idiosyncracies…

Research on the cognitive processes used in semantic priming has shown that the processing of a given stimulus is speeded by prior processing of a related stimulus as the result of automatic and/or effortful priming. To investigate the effect of age on semantic priming, two independent studies were conducted at Pomona College in California and at…

An investigation, analyzing the linking of skeleton and syntactical rules of Madurese, presents counterevidence to Marantz's claims about the nature of reduplication, and to Carrier-Duncan's claim that reduplication must precede all phonological rules. It is proposed that reduplication in Madurese is not affixation, as Marantz claims, and can be…

An ethnographic study was made of a student-led speech event in an ethnically mixed combined first- and second-grade classroom. In an activity called "Sharing Time," general rules governed appropriate ways of behaving, but no teacher rules governed ways of speaking, topic, or amount of time at talk. Collected over a 5-month period, data…

This study examined the development of metaprocessing abilities in children with varying degrees of language abilities and sought to determine if the patterns of metaprocessing development that emerged were similar for these ability groups. Subjects were 141 children ages 4-5 at the beginning of the study, divided into a control group, a low…

Conveying an adequate conception of the nature of science to students is considered by many to be implicit in the broader context of what has come to be known as scientific literacy. It has also been demonstrated that possession of valid concepts of the nature of science do not necessarily result in better science teaching. This study examines the…

An analysis of Korean language textbooks currently used by Korean children and of nationally-administered reading comprehension test items for high school graduates reveals a text-oriented reading comprehension approach in South Korea. Text orientation--seeing individual words, phrases, and sentences as semantically unified into a meaningful…