Background: Pragmatic language impairment has recently been the subject of a number of studies that attempted to illuminate classification and diagnostic issues, and identify the profile of children with pragmatic language difficulties. Although much progress has been made, the nature of pragmatic difficulties remains unclear. Aims: To contrast…

Prime pictures of emotional scenes appeared in parafoveal vision, followed by probe pictures either congruent or incongruent in affective valence. Participants responded whether the probe was pleasant or unpleasant (or whether it portrayed people or animals). Shorter latencies for congruent than for incongruent prime-probe pairs revealed affective…

False recognition, broadly defined as a claim to remember something that was not encountered previously, can arise for multiple reasons. For instance, a distinction can be made between conceptual false recognition (i.e., false alarms resulting from semantic or associative similarities between studied and tested items) and perceptual false…

An adaptive network model is proposed to represent the structure and processing of knowledge. Accessibility of subjects' stored information was measured. Relationships exist among (a) frequency of verifying a test relation, (b) other relations involving concepts used to evaluate test relation, (c) frequency of verifying those relations. (CHK)

The present paper was an attempt to look upon word meaning as a process occurring within the individual's cognitive functioning. (Author/RK)

Research is reported investigating the processes involved in rejecting certain false categorical statements. (RM)

This paper employs a phenomenological theory of human communication to re-examine several thematic concerns which were addressed in an article by Paul Watzlawick (1977) on the pathologies of "perfectionism"--an article which was, principally, an indictment of Marxism as a pathological, utopian (or perfectionist) manner of thinking. Given…

The availability of semantic information in storage and the accessibility of that information for retrieval was studied with 40 retarded and 40 nonretarded adolescents. In Experiment I, Ss were required to retrieve information from semantic categories, as well as judge whether specific items were members of a given category. Results showed that…

Three pairs of spatial antonyms (higher than/lower than, above/below, and rising away from/falling away from) were used in a task in which subjects judged whether a sentence accurately described a previously presented pictorial relationship. Subjects' reaction times were used as the dependent measure. Since all three word pairs were used…

Two experiments examined the possible role of children's semantic knowledge and their ability to encode it in a cued-recall test. Performance of children aged 7, 10, and 13 years was observed in encoding specificity tasks which used homographs as the to-be-remembered words. (MP)

Based on a corpus made up of written descriptions of comic strips done by elementary level children. Elements most frequently mentioned by the children are identified in order to relate referential content to sociocultural factors. (Text is in French.) (CDSH/AM)

Four new military training systems offer the opportunity for the application of cognitive science. They are the following: (1) a family of memorization games; (2) a simulator with a graphic, schematic student interface; (3) a system for solving problems of relative motion; and (4) a method of building cognitive skills for air-intercept control.…

The ability of 22 phonologically disordered and normally speaking children's ability to process (phonologically, syntactically, and semantically) spoken language was evaluated. No differences between groups was found in number of errors, pattern of errors, or reaction times when monitoring sentences for target words, irrespective of sentence type.…

Provides a general analysis of the problem of relating private, cognitive mechanisms of individuals to their public behavior. A computational model of language acquisition is offered. Conclusions are related to Piaget's notion of mutual verification and to some general philosophical questions about learning. (Author/RH)

Corrects errors in "A Developmental Study of Learning Disabilities and Memory" by Stephen J. Ceci (Volume 38, Number 2 1984), pages 352-371. (AS)