Tests and confirms two hypotheses about the representation of knowledge in memory: that a person's mental representation of a newly learned body of knowledge has two parts (the information presented, and a product of the person's thinking about it); and that a body of knowledge learned from experience is organized into distinct…

Suggests that two components of natural discourse (pragmatic information and knowledge about discourse style) play a role in memory for the surface form of sentences in discourse. Shows that recognition memory increased as a function of information about the speaker's positive and negative attitudes and that substantial verbatim memory was…

Offers a brief overview of the Structure Building Framework, a simple framework for describing the cognitive processes and mechanisms involved in discourse comprehension. Reviews the seminal work on which it is based (the first decade of structure-building research); and recounts the research conducted by the author to test the Structure Building…

Examines private speech utterances to understand children's verbal self-guidance during school task performances. Finds cognitive and metacognitive private speech utterances indicated children's approach to task performance; children with higher metacognitive levels of private speech were better able to self-regulate school tasks; and children's…

Suggests that a factor underlying the complex analysis of prose is amount of elaboration. Reports findings of two experiments supporting this idea. (FL)

Suggests that even the youngest children use systematic strategies in ordering the elements of a story based on causal and temporal relationships. (FL)

Demonstrates that (1) in a theory of comprehension, global coherence must refer not just to the availability of a macrostructure, but also to its ease of construction; and (2) the topic-comment assignment at the sentence level can be an important influence on the reader's perception of the passage topic. (FL)

Examined the conversations of preschool children as they completed two different tasks--a picture making task and a doll playing task. Concludes that the children's speech was primarily task-focused and that the rate of speech varied with task. (FL)

Describes a computational model of high-dimensional context space: the Hyperspace Analog to Language (HAL). Shows that HAL provides sufficient information to make semantic, grammatical, and abstract distinctions. Demonstrates the cognitive compatibility of the representations with human processing; and introduces a new methodology that extracts…

Offers an introduction to the theory and implementation of Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), a theory and method for extracting and representing the contextual-usage meaning of words by statistical computations applied to a large corpus of text. Gives an overview of applications and modeling of human knowledge to which LSA has been applied. (SR)

Comments on several quantitative approaches to semantic knowledge representations (the focus of this special issue). Points out some of the ways in which Latent Semantic Analysis and Hyperspace Analog to Language fall short of being plausible theories about psychological reality. Examines in-principle failures and wrong-kind failures that arise in…

Assesses three papers in this volume, those by Wellman and Estes, Olson and Torrance, and Hall and Nagy, for their treatment of the following: (1) definition of semantic space, (2) defining children's processes of understanding that space, and (3) describing the contexts in which cognitive language is used. (AEW)

Uses an analysis of children's interpretations of a complex episode of social interaction to illustrate three features that distinguish them from robot plans and that form a basis for a theory of the development of social action: human plans (1) are social, (2) operate on interpretations, and (3) are used, not just executed. (FL)

Examines two texts showing that the relational propositions (frequently implicit) that arise out of a combination of independent clauses involve every clause and that they occur in a pattern of propositions that connects all of the clauses together. Shows how relational propositions are essential to the functioning of the text. (HTH)

Discusses focusing, the manner in which speakers center attention on a particular element of discourse, and describes a process model of focusing that specifies what syntactic, semantic, and world knowledge constraints are needed for a hearer to track a speaker's focus in a discourse. (FL)