Under certain experimental conditions, it was affirmed more quickly that a word belonged to a large category than to a small one. This, in conjunction with other experiment results, contradicts predictions of previous theories of word meaning and supports a feature selection theory derived from Garner's critical realism position. (CHK)

Subjects compared the magnitudes of pairs of concepts from the semantic orderings of time, quality and temperature. Results showed that the semantic representations of ordered terms contain subjective magnitude information. (Author/RM)

The effect of presupposition on memory depends upon a restricted class of pragmatic conditions. If certain intended misleaders are introduced, presupposition does not enter into memory. This was shown with two experiments in which subjects "remembered" an accident differently, depending upon whether misleading facts were introduced.…

This study investigated the role of semantic variables, derivable from multidimensional scaling, in search and decision processes. (Author/RM)

Reports on two experiments conducted to test the hypothesis that the spacing effect in free recall results from greater semantic-feature variability across distributed repetitions than massed repetition. (AM)

An adaptive network model is proposed to represent the structure and processing of knowledge. Accessibility of subjects' stored information was measured. Relationships exist among (a) frequency of verifying a test relation, (b) other relations involving concepts used to evaluate test relation, (c) frequency of verifying those relations. (CHK)

Three experiments investigated the hypothesis that, when interpreted in context, general terms are typically encoded on the basis of an instantiation. Results indicated that a particular term naming the expected instantiation of a general term was a better cue for recall of a sentence than the general term itself. (CHK)

Two aspects of memory for prose were investigated. The amount of information remembered and the semantic interpretation assigned to ambiguous paragraphs. Task instructions and exposure duration of passages were varied. Recall and recognition measures indicated students remembered more with instructions requiring processing at a semantic level.…

This study tested predictions from Clark and Haviland's formalization of what people do when integrating information. Subjects were presented with simple sentences issued from a set of complex ideas, and asked to reconstruct the complete ideas. Results support predictions based on a recoding strategy formalized by Clark and Haviland. (CHK)

Ordering preferences for English adjectives in attributive (prenominal) and predicative (postnominal) positions were found to be in general agreement. Semantically congruent and incongruent adjectives were compared regarding ordering preferences and a "borrowing" theory is proposed. (CHK)

To show the organization of recall, items that are remembered together can be written on the same line of a two-dimensional (2D) grid. Such 2D recall does not induce the clustering it reveals. Various aspects of 2D recall and the clustering it reveals are discussed. (Author/RM)

To test the hypothesis that meaning of a sentence is represented in an abstract format rather than one mediated by words or images, 96 spoken sentences were immediately followed by a word or drawing probe. It was concluded that sentence or probe meaning is represented in an abstract conceptual format. (CHK)

Listeners shadowed lists of words or parts of sentences, and shadowing latencies were recorded. The effect of attended context was interpreted as a result of strategical manipulation of response bias (a resource-limited process), whereas unattended context may be effective through spreading excitation in semantic memory (a data-limited process).…

A theory of comprehension in verification tasks is developed from a general conception of language comprehension. Models are developed for a task involving transfer verbs "borrow" and "loan" and the possession verb "have." Models and theoretical framework are superior in some respects to constituent comparison and conversion models. (CHK)

Verifying simple sentences generally involves a process wherein the meanings of individual words are combined to form the meaning of the entire sentence. Three experiments are described in which the combination process was investigated by asking subjects to decide whether S-V-Adj-O sentences were true or false. (Author/RM)