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)

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)

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…

Discusses three experiments investigating the development of word-by-word comprehension in 5-, 7-, and 10-year olds. Subjects monitored for target words in a sentence. Variable included types of monitoring tasks and distribution and context of target words. Results are discussed in terms of the types of comprehension processes various tasks…

Discusses a sequential, three-stage model of how nonliteral expressions are understood, as proposed in recent linguistic, philosophical, and psychological studies. Testing the model's implication that nonliteral meanings of sentences are ignored whenever literal meanings are plausible, finds evidence that both meanings are processed simultaneously…

Presents a model of high-dimensional context space, the Hyperspace Analogue to Language (HAL), with a series of simulations modelling human empirical results. Proposes that HAL's context space can be used to provide a basic categorization of semantic and grammatical concepts; model certain aspects of morphological ambiguity in verbs; and provide…

Two experiments tested for effects of intralist cues upon recognition probability. Categorized and random lists were each tested, with targets appearing with zero, one or three intralist cues. Experiments showed substantial effects of trials and list type, but not of intralist context. (CHK)

Two experiments are described in which reaction times for understanding target sentences or phrases in terms of a preceding context were measured. It is argued that both experiments can be accounted for in terms of contextually generated expectations. (Author/RM)

Three experiments investigated whether abstract as well as concrete sentences can be processed in a holistic manner. Results suggest that the processing of both types of sentences involves construction of particularized, holistic mental representations that contain information and inferences based on context and knowledge of language and the…

Raises problem of affective acceptance by teachers and student teachers of psycholinguistic formulations appearing to run counter to intuitive notions of the reading process. Presents three psycholinguistic formulations operationalized via several modified reading experiences. Demonstrates use by the reader of multiple information sources and…

Reports two experiments which support the hypothesis that reaction time is faster to phonemes when the phonetic context matches the listener's expectation than when the vowel context is different. Reaction time to syllable targets is equal to phoneme, matched context targets. (PMJ)

The study described here offers a model of target-context relations in language comprehension. It is based on the hypothesis that the same formal mechanisms that produce cohesion in discourse and texts are critically involved in language comprehension. The model posits that: (1) the comprehension of a target turn is primarily dependent on the…

A review of the literature on miscue analysis supports the assumption that reading is a language process. All three language cue systems--graphophonic, syntactic, and semantic--must interact if reading for meaning is to occur, and a whole language environment is necessary for a student to develop reading proficiency. (AEA)

The encoding specificity principle predicts that a change in context between input and test will adversely affect recognition memory. Experiment I tested this with sentences from a prose passage and no context effects were obtained. Experiments II, III, and IV compared context effects for words in random sentences versus connected discourse. In…

Recognizing a word in a meaningful text involves processes that combine information from many different sources, and both bottom-up processes (such as feature extraction and letter recognition) and top-down processes (contextual information) are thought to interact when skilled readers recognize words. Two similar experiments investigated word…