The conversion model of formal reasoning was examined for its ability to predict the decisions made by college students when solving concrete and abstract syllogisms. Results supported the model's contentions that reasoner's decisions reflect natural language processes in the encoding of syllogistic premises, and follow rationally from…

A lexicalist, or direct-mapping, view of the relationship between syntactic functions and surface syntactic relations and a link between semantic features and the assignment of arguments to syntactic functions are advocated. An experiment with 192 undergraduate students examines the issues as problems of language production. (SLD)

Forced-choice items, investigating the performance of 80 undergraduates on verbal classification and verbal analogy, were sequentially presented, allowing independent estimates of the accuracy of four principle component processes: inference, application, recognition, and distraction. Within-task performance showed substantial individual variation…

Presents a rationale for studying psycholinguistic aspects of the writing process and outlines a model of writing based on a psycholinguistic model of talking. Offers an analytical study of 450 syntax errors written by college students demonstrating the usefulness of studying writing as derivative of normal speaking processes. (HOD)

The slower progress of semantic memory research is attributed to the difficulties involved in testing the relevant theories. This paper proposes a model for testing such theories using the Continuous Response (CR) task. The model establishes a link between the rate of recall and the semantic relationships among the category items. (JAZ)

A study investigated reconstructive recall for linguistic style. It was hypothesized that (1) features of linguistic style would be more difficult to recall than underlying content, (2) reconstructive errors would include stylistic forms recalled as standard forms when subjects lacked productive control of a particular feature of a style, and (3)…

Schuberth and Eimas (EJ 159 939) reported that context and frequency effects added to determine reaction times in a lexical decision (word v nonword) task. The present reexamination shows that context and frequency do interact, with semantic context facilitating the processing of low-frequency words more than high-frequency words. (Author/CP)

The purpose of this study was to compare traditional classification training for a set of abstract concepts with multiple-relations training consisting of inference practice and the use of a content diagram. To examine this, 200 undergraduate and graduate psychology students completed a Web-based tutorial covering the abstract concepts of a…