Many cognitive scientists regard language as a rich source of evidence about the human mind. Much research over the past forty years has been driven by the assumption that words reveal underlying concepts. At the same time, cross-linguistic work has shown that languages differ dramatically in how they partition the world by name. To maintain the…

Disagreement exists regarding the functional locus of semantic interference of distractor words in picture naming. This effect is a cornerstone of modern psycholinguistic models of word production, which assume that it arises in lexical response-selection. However, recent evidence from studies of dual-task performance suggests a locus in…

Discusses experiments testing the adequacy of the common attribute-value representation for knowledge about concepts. (AM)

Phenomenology has made an important contribution to understanding the human mind by offering a rigorous description of consciousness. This essay's intent is to provide a familiarity with the vocabulary and concepts of phenomenology as an aid to the general scholar. (Author/JB)

Ideas and studies in the psycholinguistics of meaning are discussed. (DB)

A theory for representation of concepts in memory is proposed which emphasizes the association of salient exemplars with the concept. Previous theories dealing with the classification processes involved in acquiring new concepts have shown that clear category boundaries do not exist. It is proposed that present theory must account for the…

A series of studies on young children's use of the terms "same" and "different" are reported. The work began from the observation that young children could respond correctly to instructions involving "same" but were often incorrect in response to "different". This finding was replicated under a variety of experimental conditions and found to be…

Three experiments were conducted to study the inferencing processes involved in anaphoric reference. Results show that an anaphora activates both its referent and concepts when in the same proposition as the referent, and that all three, when in the same proposition, are connected in the long-term representation of a text. (PJM)

Previous research has reported instances in which some two-year-olds failed to overextend in comprehension what they overextended in use. Fremgen and Fay found no instance of overextension in comprehension in separate experiments. From this Fremgen and Fay conclude children never overextend in comprehension. This conclusion is re-evaluated here.…

This paper examines possible interchanges between cognitive and language processes with particular attention given to concept formation and semantic language development. Aspects of psychological and contemporary linguistic theories are discussed as a way to interrelate the functions of thought and language. The author concludes that while…

Describes a study which used a discrimination-learning procedure to compare the ability of language-disordered and normal children to modify hypotheses. In a series of two-dimensional learning set and orthogonal problems, all children reached learning set criteria quickly; on orthogonal problems, language-disordered children performed…

It is suggested that twin discourse functions are served by thematization and topicalization, the former providing stable referential focus and the latter providing momentary referential focus. (Author/AM)

The "property-set model" is proposed for concept learning and subsequent recognition and classification of old and new exemplars. In an experimental evaluation of alternative models, the property-set model was the best predictor of both recognition and classification performance. (Author/RM)

Presents a computer simulation testing semantic networks and spreading activation models of human memory. Describes how a sentence is encoded by building a working memory structure from its words and from semantic memory concepts related to its meaning. Retrieval processes use cue words or sentences to locate working memory structures. (Author/MES)