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…

Describes three experiments designed to investigate the effect of sentence organization on the comprehension of procedural directions. Ease of comprehension was determined by measuring reading time for two different sentence patterns, while subjects followed instructions to operate an unfamiliar device. Experimental results showed that…

Each of 464 noun pairs was rated for synonymy on a seven-point scale by college students to provide an extensive set of synonym pairs for use as stimuli in experiments, and to evaluate the effects of word encoding order on perceived synonymy. (SW)

Two experiments measured the frequency of perceptual errors as a function of differential presupposition in descriptive sentences. More errors occurred when misrepresentation involved presupposition than when it involved the focused proposition. Several surface structures of English, in combination, increased the presuppositional strength of the…

Reports on a study designed to show that Tulving's theory of encoding specificity and Bahrick's theory of associative continuity are not contradictory, rather complementary. (CLK)

Research is reported in which children were tested for their comprehension of four types of sentences with relative clauses. The Parallel Function Hypothesis is proposed, and implications for adult grammar are discussed. (Author/RM)

Two psycholinguistic processes are examined in a phoneme monitoring experiment and a sentence completion experiment. Tests were conducted with matched materials on subjects drawn from one population. With ambiguous lexical items all meanings are retrieved, but following a decision stage only one is transferred to memory. (SC)

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)

Earlier version of this paper was delivered to the 1972 Convention of the Eastern Psychological Association, Boston, Mass. (RS)

Investigation supported by a grant from the U.S. Office of Education. (VM)

Partial report of data presented at the 1971 convention of the Eastern Psychological Association. (VM)

In open-ended and forced-choice situations, subjects were asked to interpret phrases containing superficially incompatible adjective pairs. The results demonstrate that English speakers implicitly understand proposed linguistic principles underlying prenominal adjective ordering. (SW)

Two experiments examine the extent to which the representation of a sentence depends upon the overall nature of a subject's task, in this case, memorization of a sentence and providing a continuation for a sentence. (AM)

Examines the verification of false sentences of the form "All S are P." It was found that the number of properties shared by the subject and predicate concept of the sentence was directly proportional to reaction time. These findings question the assumption that only property relations are prestored in memory. (Author/EJS)