Presents studies to explore imagery at several levels of meaning, and use of imagery in analyzing implicit aspects of meaning. Studies using sentence verification task with pairs of concrete or abstract sentences concluded that concrete sentences are verified faster for explicit and implicit test items; paraphrases were verified more rapidly than…

Argues that existing evidence does not discredit the notion that hypermnesia (increased recall across repeated testing) is related to level of recall. (EKN)

Discusses three experiments which provide evidence for the conclusions that hypermnesia (increased recall with repeated testing) does not depend on the encoding of material in an imaginal format but is related to the level of recall across conditions within an experiment. (EKN)

Reviews empirical evidence which suggests that level of recall does not determine hypermnesia (increased recall with repeated testing). Discusses the problem of deciding between a levels-of-processing and an imagery hypothesis of hypermnesia. (EKN)

Subjects compared pairs of nonconcrete and "nonimageable" words along a dimension which has no physical analog--the evaluative dimension of the semantic differential. Their reaction time to do so was an inverse logarithmic function of the difference between the numerical "goodness' values they had assigned to the words. (Author/RM)

A variant of the Peterson (1959) paradigm was used to investigate retrieval of single pairs of items varying in imagery value. Latency to respond showed that if one item was concrete, no differential retrieval speeds were found. This result supports an organizational view of imagery. (CHK)

This study was based on that of Jorgensen and Kintsch (1973) regarding verification time and ease of imagery of sentences. The present study concluded that the results of Jorgensen and Kintsch do not distinguish the effects of rated imagery on reaction time from the effects of semantic relatedness and semantic complexity. (Author/RM)

Research done while the first author was on a Science Scholarship from the National Research Council of Canada (NRC); research also supported by an NRC grant to the second author; forms part of Shannon Moeser's doctoral thesis submitted to McGill University. (VM)

Presents study performed to clarify the role that imagery plays in sentence understanding. Results show that reading selectively interferes with comprehension of high-imagery sentences and demonstrates that sentence comprehension is not a process that is independent of the decoding stage. (Author/BK)

A set of experiments are reported in which it was found that most subjects were better at identifying both meaning and wording changes in concrete sentences and subjects took significantly longer to encode and decode the abstract sentences. Implications of these findings are discussed. (Author/RM)

Report from the Wisconsin Research and Development Center for Cognitive Learning, supported in part as a research and development center by funds from the United States Office of Education, Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. (VM)

Research part of a Senior Honors Thesis submitted to Kent State University by Patricia Sorce, who was a National Science Foundation Undergraduate Research Participant while conducting this research. (VM)

Research supported by grants from the United States Public Health Service and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. (DS)