Three experiments investigated factors influencing the integration of facts acquired from texts. Subjects encountered related facts in the context of relatively long, meaningful texts, a single text, or in two separate texts. Results indicate that integration can occur in both cases. (SW)

Describes a semantic priming task using both words and pictures as primes and targets in an investigation of the order of access to certain kinds of stored information. Results suggest that naming represents a shallower level of processing than categorization for both words and pictures. (EKN)

The hypothesis that free recall involves the generation of candidate items followed by a decision process was tested in a situation which compared a standard recall test with a test that involved the overt generation and recognition of candidate items. (SW)

A study examined 12 preschool children's early use of "who,""what," and "which" questions in spontaneous speech. Results indicated that children began to ask object questions before they asked subject questions, and acquired argument questions before adjunct questions. It was suggested that the two results could…

Four experiments were conducted to investigate the memory status of inflectional forms of verbs, irregular past tense words, and adjective and nominal derivatives of verbs. Results indicated that inflections do not have memory representations separate from their base words, but adjective and nominal derivatives and irregular past tense words do.…

In open-ended and forced-choice situations, subjects were asked to interpret phrases containing superficially incompatible adjective pairs. The results demonstrate that English speakers implicitly understand proposed linguistic principles underlying prenominal adjective ordering. (SW)

Examines whether, after a single reading, the recall of text elements depends on the length of the passage. Results show more detail was remembered 23 hours later for short passages than for long. Concludes that negative effects of passage length on test performance were due in part to acquisition processes rather than retrieval. (EKN)

Three experiments investigated whether preschoolers attend to actions or object when learning a novel verb. Findings showed that children learning nouns in the context of novel, moving objects attended exclusively to appearances of objects. Children learning verbs attended equally to appearances and motions. With familiar objects, children…

Examines the effects of having both a semantic and a superficial perceptual category for organizing lists of words in free recall. Discusses the effect of individual difference characteristics, such as personality characteristics of the subject, on the results. (EKN)

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)

The results of three experiments provide evidence that the observed detrimental effects of acoustic similarity on serial recall may be a consequence of poorer memory for the order of consonant sounds as opposed to vowel sounds. (PMJ)

Two experiments showed the proportion of recalled words recognized to be higher than expected when the experiment was conducted under typical study conditions. Under special study conditions, the proportion of recalled words recognized more closely approximated expected values. Exceptions depend on encoding operations rather than on the properties…

Two experiments investigated the relationship of verification to the answering of yes-no questions. Subjects verified simple statements or answered simple questions. Various proposals concerning the relative difficulty of answering questions and verifying statements were considered, and a model was proposed. (SW)

A study examined how preschool children use information about linguistic contrast in learning new words. The 72 subjects were assigned to four groups to play a game. They were asked to get an unfamiliar item, one of nine swatches of different colors, shapes, and materials. In the first group, the children were told only one label (color, shape, or…

Preschoolers' ability to utilize language in spatial problem solving was tested with 64 predominately middle-class children. The number of correct responses was analyzed using an age/sex/medium analysis of variance. It was found that the verbal response mode leads to substantially more correct responses than do pictures and that girls performed…