A total of 28 children were tested for comprehension of spatial antonym pairs with arrays which contained four objects representing both members of two antonym pairs. The results supported a modified semantic-feature hypothesis, in which polarity is acquired before dimension. (Author/LLK)

Children in grades 1, 3, and 5 were asked to decide whether selected contradictory sentences were true or false. The age at which children were first able to evaluate the false sentences correctly corresponded to the relative speed with which adults evaluated the sentences in a timed vertification task. (Author/JMB)

Tested the comprehension of 3- and 4-year-old children with probable and improbable sentences in active and passive voice in order to evaluate the importance of semantic support for comprehension of passive sentences. (Author/SDH)

This study attempted to determine: (1) whether lower-order units (agent or agent-action) within the agent-action-recipient relationship exist in any functional way in the 1-word infant's comprehension of speech; and (2) whether the use of repetition and/or reduced length (common modifications in adult-to-infant speech) used to focus on these…

Four types of semantic relation, assumed by different researchers to be implicated in the organization of semantic information, were investigated by means of false recognition and word association tasks presented to independent samples of 4- and 5-year-old children. (Author/SB)

Presents a study which assessed preschool children's understanding of "front,""back," and "side" through a variety of tasks. A developmental sequence is defined. (ED)

This article discusses a study designed to ascertain the comprehension of the role of "because" in a sentence in children between the ages of 5;8 and 10;11. (CFM)

Results of a verbal sound and meaning discrimination test to check the hypothesis of Alajouanine et al.--that two types of paraphasics can be distinguished, phonemic and semantic--are discussed. The former are impaired in tests of auditory language discrimination, the latter show regression of the semantic values apparent in their linguistic…

This research studied the processes which enable people to acquire semantic information from natural-language discourse. Specific objectives were: (1) to represent semantically the structural meaning of English discourse by a well-defined semantic model; (2) to develop a way of using the semantic representation of a text as a structural model for…

This study was designed to determine whether infants could perceive action role reversals when the direction of action is ruled out as a cue; whether infants consider inanimate, nonpotent objects to be unlikely agents; and whether both these discriminations could be reliably reflected in the heart rate response. (Author/SB)

Reports on an experiment in which performance on abstract and concrete sentences was compared in a sentence meaning classification task and in a free recall task. Results show that concrete sentences were classified significantly faster than abstract ones. (CLK)

The study investigated the communicative effectiveness of word order in preschoolers' comprehension of meaning using simple questions and commands in an at-home play context. (ST)

This article discusses a study designed to determine the order of acquisition of the two expressions "in front of" and "behind," using two featureless objects. (CFM)

"More" and "less" were analyzed into two meaning dimensions, "occurence" and "quantity", which were hypothesized to be developmentally related to acts of addition and subtraction. (SBT)