An experiment is reported that uses cross-modal priming to look at the resolution of anaphoric reference. Subjects given a visual lexical decision test simultaneously with an auditorily presented sentence showed selective semantic activation of the pronoun's referent on the basis of the pronoun's lexical properties. This finding is discussed in…

Investigates the interaction between lexical knowledge and listening comprehension in a second language. Examines how 59 Japanese university students of low-intermediate to advanced English ability were tested using first-language recall protocols as comprehension measures. Concludes that efficient listening strategies may make comprehending…

Two studies examined the role of self-reference as a mnemonic for prose material. Prior to reading descriptive passages, undergraduate students received self-reference, other-reference, linguistic, or control processing instructions. Overall, the self-reference instructions resulted in the greatest amount of recall. (Author/LMO)

Discusses experiments that investigated the sources of knowledge that are employed in spoken word identification. The interactive assumption that normal spoken word identification processes require the presence of semantic and syntactic context and the special status given to word-initial acoustic-phonetic information in cohort theory were…

Describes a study which examines the relationship between context redundancy and keyword intelligibility in sentences having both high and low redundancy. Word pairs were placed in similar positions in two sets of sentences: sentence pairs that one might find in text, and adages together with sentences that might be spoken. (SED)

Research results indicated that children were able to use information from a number of sources in interpreting commands in which the relational terms were replaced by nonsense. Linguistic and nonlinguistic context and prior repetition presented constraints to children's responses. (Author/JB)

A study was conducted to demonstrate the value of a mnemonic strategy in remembering information from prose passages and to assess processing differences associated with three variations of the mnemonic strategy. The subjects were 220 eighth grade students who read four short fictional biographies and answered recall questions that were either…

Five experiments were conducted on the ways that college students processed ambiguous words in sentences. Two classes of ambiguous words (noun-noun and noun-verb) and two types of context (priming and nonpriming) were investigated using a variable stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) priming paradigm. Noun-noun ambiguities consisted of two semantically…

Discusses three experiments which investigated the role of convention and context in understanding indirect requests. Experiments 1 and 2 showed the wide variety of conventions used and how context determines conventionality. Experiment 3 showed how conventional requests take less time to process than nonconventional ones. (Author/PJM)

Skills in the visual encoding of words were tested by comparing the performances of fourth-grade children with those of adults. In each experiment, adults responded more rapidly to the stimuli than did children. Using a masking procedure, the study determined that the variance in response times was caused by levels of motor skill development…

In order to test hypotheses derived from the concept that grammatical, syntactic, semantic, and contextual cues affect the degree of reading comprehension in a visual display, the present investigation was undertaken using the French language. The subjects were approximately 30 college students in a second-semester elementary French course. Five…

Two studies investigated the processing of metaphor, specifically (1) the extent to which metaphor is processed similarly to literal language and (2) the effects of the presence or absence of a specific context on processing. In the first study, 82 college students listened to one of four taped lectures, each containing 22 metaphors. The tapes…

This research characterizes how the mental lexicon functions during sentence processing. In sentence processing, access of meaning is seen to be dependent on interaction between syntactic and semantic information within the sentence. It had been previously thought that meaning had been located in an independent mental lexicon. Three experiments…

An experiment is reported which shows that with identical preceding context, the same initial phoneme targets contained in high transitional probability words were responded to significantly faster than those in low transitional probability words. The result argues for the importance of transitional probability as an independent variable in…

Investigated three aspects of children's early language knowledge: (1) comparison of preschoolers response to written stimuli in familiar environmental contexts (on signs and billboards) with responses presented in a traditional reading task format; (2) developmental changes in preschoolers' knowledge of written language; and (3) preschoolers'…