A Virtual Resource Center (VRC) has been brought into use since 2008 as an integral part of a task-based language teaching and learning program for Business English courses at Nantes University, France. The objective of the center is to enable students to work autonomously and individually on their language problems so as to improve their language…

Two experiments examining the "distinctiveness of encoding" hypothesis are reported. The hypothesis suggests that specific forms of processing of events may result in the formation of more exact perceptual descriptions and thus more distinctive records in memory. The two experiments reported address shortcomings in previous research on…

Current research on information processing suggests that short term memory plays a central role in the sorting and manipulation of text information during reading. Because an entire text cannot be processed simultaneously, successive "chunks" or units of information enter the short term memory where they are compared to the reader's previous…

The research reported here examines the influence of knowledge of two languages on the organization of semantic information in long-term memory. Eight English-French bilingual adults were presented pairs of letter strings and had to decide whether both strings were words. Half of the trials contained English-French word pairs which required a…

The "levels effect," the finding that the more central to the meaning of a passage an idea is the more likely that idea is to be retained, does not seem to hold for immediate recognition. Therefore, a study was conducted to test a model of information storage that predicted that when surface structure information was preserved in its…

Although techniques of autosuggestion in personal development have a long history in some Eastern cultures, suggestibility as a character trait first came into focus in the West with the "animal magnetism" of Franz Mesmer. The uncovering of the nature and phenomena of hypnosis resulted in a steady and enduring interest in this state of…

"Levels of processing" is an explanatory framework postulating that differences in memory processing quality or effort affect the duration of the memory trace. Using recall (immediate, one week, or two week) for connected discourse processed under three semantic and three orthographic interference conditions, as well as a noninterference…

Three main issues relating to the question of silent speech in reading are considered: (1) How do Chinese speakers process Chinese ideographs in short-term memory? (2) How is Chinese students' learning of written English affected by the transition to an alphabetic language? (3) Are the strategies for encoding written words in short-term memory…

All beginners at simultaneous interpreting falter at the flow of oral language, unaware that their short-term semantic flow of oral language, unaware that his short-term semantic memory can be managed more efficiently if used to store units of meaning rather than discrete words. Beginners must learn to listen for sense from the start and focus…

An experiment was carried out to determine how the memory search of a two-clause complex sentence in immediate memory is carried out. An item-recognition task was performed with 32 native English-speaking, right-handed adults who listened to eight two-clause complex sentences presented to the left ear, each immediately followed by a probe word…

Examines the role of organization in adults' processing of stories. Canonical stories were better recalled than noncanonical stories by all three age groups (young, middle-aged, and old adults), and a variety of measures indicated that older adults' recall was both quantitatively and qualitatively similar to that of young adults. (SL)

Language appears at multiple levels of representation in memory. In most cases, languages have a particular system of sounds (phonology), meaning (semantics), form (orthography), and common usage (pragmatics). For a bilingual speaker, these appear for two different sets of concepts. Sometimes, these concepts overlap, as is the case for…

The distinction in meanings of the English word "educated" and Spanish "educado" is used to illustrate a theory of semantic memory for the bilingual that proposes two lexical stores, one for each language, in close cooperation with and connected by one semantic memory. The postulated relation between the lexicons and the semantic memory is…

A study compared the way in which subjects belonging to four different age groups produced written recall and summary responses after being presented with a narrative story. A seventh-grade-level, 500-word story that contained 78 idea units was presented to two groups of adolescents (mean ages, 14.14 years and 17.55 years) and two groups of adults…

A study investigated processing differences between metaphorical and literal versions of the same sentences. The purposes of the study were (1) to directly compare the on-line processing demands of metaphoric and nonmetaphoric sentences, and (2) to examine the consequences of such sentences for memory performance. The subjects were 39 college…