The goal of this study was to examine how lexical association and discourse congruence affect the time course of processing incoming words in spoken discourse. In an event-related potential (ERP) norming study, we presented prime-target pairs in the absence of a sentence context to obtain a baseline measure of lexical priming. We observed a…

The aim of the study was to investigate and compare the ability to make inferences in three groups of children ranging from 5;2 to 10;9 years: 10 children with cerebral palsy (CP), 10 children with spina bifida and hydrocephalus (SBH) and 10 children with pragmatic language impairment (PLI). The relationship between inferential and literal…

This study examined how the two cerebral hemispheres recruit semantic processing mechanisms by combining event-related potential measures and visual half-field methods in a word priming paradigm in which semantic strength and predictability were manipulated using lexically associated word pairs. Activation patterns on the late positive complex…

Gestalt psychologists proposed two distinct learning mechanisms. Associative learning occurs gradually through the repeated co-occurrence of external stimuli or memories. Insight learning occurs suddenly when people discover new relationships within their prior knowledge as a result of reasoning or problem solving processes that re-organize or…

This research develops a narrative of incidents of intentional learning by students studying undergraduate economics as represented in their written reflective journals. The deliberate integration of learner reflection, reflective practice and reflective writing into the pedagogy may facilitate transfer learning (Sousa, 2006). Transfer has been…

A word-by-word human sentence processing complexity metric is presented. This metric formalizes the intuition that comprehenders have more trouble on words contributing larger amounts of information about the syntactic structure of the sentence as a whole. The formalization is in terms of the conditional entropy of grammatical continuations, given…

Defining metaphor as "seeing a concept from one class in terms of a concept from another class," a study was devised that analyzed the degree to which two concepts occupy dissimilar positions with respect to their category or domain (within-domain distance), and the degree to which categories themselves are dissimilar (between-domain distance).…

This study examines the effect of expectation (children's judgments as to the probable actor within a given sentence) upon comprehension of passive sentences, the relationship of syntactic comprehension to the paradigmatic-syntagmatic shift in word associations, and the effect of sex on each. Forty first-graders and 40 kindergarteners were blocked…

In a test of the generality of the comprehension hypothesis, educable mentally retarded children in primary classes were assigned, following pretraining measures, to experimental (n=24) and control (n=12) conditions. (Author)

Idiom comprehension was assessed in 10 aphasic patients with semantic deficits by means of a string-to-picture matching task. Patients were also submitted to an oral explanation of the same idioms, and to a word comprehension task. The stimuli of this last task were the words following the verb in the idioms. Idiom comprehension was severely…

Twenty college students, ten each in the experimental and control groups, were the subjects of an experiment designed to demonstrate that integration of verb meanings occurs in connected discourse. Six paragraph-length stories, each of which included one or two critical sentences containing a general verb, were presented orally to the subjects.…

THE AUTHOR'S POSITION WAS THAT, BECAUSE PEOPLE OFTEN DIFFER IN THEIR UNDERSTANDING OF THE MEANING OF WORDS, LINGUISTS MUST WORK WITH PSYCHOLOGISTS, NEUROLOGISTS, AND OTHERS TO GUIDE LANGUAGE TEACHERS IN THEIR KNOWLEDGE OF HOW A LANGUAGE WORKS AND HOW BEST TO COMMUNICATE THIS KNOWLEDGE TO THEIR STUDENTS. WHILE DENOTATIVE MEANING REFERS PRIMARILY TO…

This study discusses the importance of comprehension in reading and describes a tool for measuring reading comprehension according to an individual reader's "structures of meaning." The procedure for developing a visual representation of this structure involves three distinct steps. After reading the text, student and teacher employ techniques,…

Rhetoric, reasoning, and reflection are discussed as the tools which enable a reader to distend the experience of reading to its greatest limits. Rhetoric is interpreted as the facility which allows the reader to understand both the necessary "how" and "what" of an author's work. Eleven cognitive processes used in written material are defined and…

This study of college undergraduates had two purposes: (1) to determine whether cognitive structure, as assessed by psychometric measures of concept interrelatedness, can be developed; and (2) to apply those measures to a learning situation that has produced a nonspecific transfer effect--the facilitative effect of concrete examples on learning…