It is of deep interest to both linguists and psychologists alike to account for how young children acquire an understanding of number words. In their commentaries, Barner and Butterworth both point out that an important question highlighted by the work of Syrett, Musolino, and Gelman, and one that remains highly controversial, is where number…

Three groups of 20 subjects received two exposures of a list of ten sentences followed by an immediate written recall test. The sentences varied in syntactic complexity from group to group, but the sentences for the three groups were similar in semantic content. The effect of sentence complexity upon recall performance was not found to be…

This document comprises two studies. In the first, 108 undergraduates were assigned to nine groups of 12 subjects each in a 3 x 3 factorial design. One factor was prompt word (subject noun, main verb, or object noun) and the other was sentence type (active, passive, or relative. Sentence type was included in the study in order to vary the position…

This paper evaluates associative theories of sentence memory, based on the model of J.R. Anderson and G.H. Bower. A model of Human Associative Memory (HAM) is generalized and defined, and alternative models incorporating configural information are presented. (CK)

It was hypothesized that Ss hearing sentences containing reported utterances would confuse these sentences with new sentences containing illocutionary forces or perlocutionary effects consistent with the original sentences. Predicted effects were found in recall for illocutionary forces and in recognition memory for perlocutionary effects.…

Reports on research on the effect of various encoding and retrieval conditions on sentence recall. (AM)

In the present study, in which narrative passages were divided into linguistic subunits and these subunits measured for their structural importance, it was determined that the structural importance of the units was related to recall. (FWB)

Reported were two studies designed to clarify the effects of verbal elaboration on children's learning. Study I was undertaken to replicate, with controlled training times, an earlier investigation of the effects of three types of extended verbal elaboration (sentences, semantic paragraphs, and syntactic paragraphs). Trials to criterion analyses…

An experiment was conducted to determine if the structure of a stimulus sentence--as evidenced in the recall pattern of the sentence--could be predicted from information contained in the sentence associations it elicited. Sentence associations to 20 simple sentences were collected from a group of subjects. The free recall of the same 20 sentences…

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)

Three experiments investigated a characteristic of the propositions that underlie sentences. For some of the sentences tested, the same concepts occurred repeatedly across the underlying propositions; for others, concepts were seldom repeated. Repetitions were shown to facilitate sentence processing. (Author/RM)

Results indicated that negative instances were an integral part of concept acquisiton. The relationship between the positive and negative instances was based upon similarity of irrelevant attributes and sentence difficulty. (Author)

This study examines the processes whereby new information is integrated with generalized world knowledge. (Author/RM)