The product of researchers' efforts to develop a computer processor which distinguishes between relevant and irrelevant information in the database, Spreading Activation Processor for Information Encoded in Network Structures (SAPIENS) exhibits (1) context sensitivity, (2) efficiency, (3) decreasing activation over time, (4) summation of…

Research efforts to model speech perception in terms of a processing system in which knowledge and processing are distributed over large numbers of highly interactive--but computationally primative--elements are described in this report. After discussing the properties of speech that demand a parallel interactive processing system, the report…

Three experiments investigated the development in young children of two concepts: the antecedent possibilities for reflexives (e.g., himself or herself) and pronouns (e.g., him or her). In the first experiment, 156 English-speaking children aged 2;6 to 6;6 and 21 adults were tested for their understanding of antecedents within reflexive sentences,…

A study investigated some of the ways in which phenomena are perceived and translated into speech, especially in the assignment of agents in a given situation. Subjects were 16 adults with infant children. The adults were shown the Visual Cliff series of pictures of an infant crawling to its mother across a glass sheet covering an open space with…

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…

Two experiments were conducted to determine whether the connective structure of a passage might protect interrelated information from interference by irrevelant information in sentence recognition. Subjects of both experiments were college students enrolled in introductory psychology classes. In each, a rating task for unconnected phrases was…

Relational-inference, a process associated with developmental change in performance on classification items, was investigated in two experiments. The accuracy and latency with which 20 subjects at each of 3 age levels (8, 11, and adult) stated relationships among concepts were tested. In experiment 1, 40 triplets of concepts related by a class…

To test F. J. Morrison's conceptualization of reading disability as the failure to master the complex irregular system of rules governing sound-symbol correspondence in English (1980), a study investigated the speed with which disabled and normal readers processed short vowels, long vowels, and vowel digraphs. Subjects consisted of two groups of…

This essay, the concluding section of a larger study, examines the present state of cognitive science and instructional theory as reflected in the study's earlier chapters. Cognitive analyses of tasks are reported in the broad domain of language comprehension and production (e.g., understanding, composing, and answering questions about texts). The…

A study investigated the degree to which elementary school reading teachers understood the reading process. Thirty teachers were asked to respond to four questions: (1) Have you ever thought about what you do when you read? (2) Have you ever thought about how meaning is represented in written language? (3) When you are reading, what do you do when…

Thirty college undergraduates participated in a study of the effects of acoustic and visual interference on the recall of word and picture triads in both short-term and long-term memory. The subjects were presented 24 triads of monosyllabic nouns representing all of the possible combinations of presentation types: pictures, printed words, and…

A decline exists in children's ability at ages 4 and 5 to accurately respond to the difference between polar adjectives such as "big" and "tall.""Taller" and "bigger" are both taken to mean "having a higher top point," rather than "bigger" meaning "greater overall mass." Two hypotheses are put forth to explain this. The "strong cognitive…

A discussion of the functions of human communication shows that underlying them is the cognitive process by which people have the ability to take the view of others, to internally represent reality, and to take into account knowledge and experience to choose future actions. These features of decentration and abstraction reveal the link between…

The relationship between the effects of morphological complexity and associative production frequency was investigated in two experiments on sentence verification. The purpose of the study was to investigate how morphologically derived words are represented in memory. (Author/RM)

Four experiments are reported in which relations of semantic distance to response latencies in similarity judgments, to reaction times in a same-different classification task, and to proximity of recall in a free recall task were investigated. (Author/RM)