A functional, perceptual-motor, account of serial short-term memory (STM) is examined by investigating the way in which an irrelevant spoken sequence interferes with verbal serial recall. Even with visual list-presentation, verbal serial recall is particularly susceptible to disruption by irrelevant spoken stimuli that have the same identity…

The present study investigated whether lexical access is affected by a regular phonological variation in connected speech: voice assimilation in French. Two associative priming experiments were conducted to determine whether strongly assimilated, potentially ambiguous word forms activate the conceptual representation of the underlying word. Would…

Williams syndrome (WS) is a neurodevelopmental genetic disorder often described as being characterized by a dissociative cognitive architecture, in which profound impairments of visuo-spatial cognition contrast with relative preservation of linguistic, face recognition and auditory short-memory abilities. This asymmetric and dissociative cognition…

This study investigated novel word acquisition by 18- and 24-month-old children in the context of adult referential behavior independent of variations in salience. Findings suggest that 24-month olds use referential intent of the speaker to learn new words, but when learning, they may have a less secure grasp on the meaning of speakers'…

The effect of a classification, or encoding, task on intentional free recall was examined. Examination of the serial position curves for immediate and free recall shows clear effects assigned to long-term store. Consideration of effects regarding levels of processing gives a parallel account differing only in terminology and emphasis. (CHK)

Partial pictures facilitated performance when presented with verbal information, but not when presented with the test questions. Sentence repetition facilitated performance only on questions presumed to reflect relatively shallow information processing. (Author/STS)

Previous research has shown that concrete concepts are more readily attained than abstract concepts. In the present study this dominance effect was confirmed for verbal materials, even when instances and concepts were equivalent in instance frequency, meaningfulness and conjoint frequency. This effect was especially marked under high memory-load…

Performance changes during the course of single-trial free recall were investigated in five experiments. (Author/RM)

Many theories of memory assume memory representations are abstract and exclude specific lexical information. Results of three experiments in this study suggest lexical information is present and persists in memory representations of meaning. A word-based theory of memory should be preferred over available theoretical alternatives. (CHK)

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)

This paper makes an informational analysis of teachers' verbal discourse. A behavioral analysis is also made in terms of "tacts" and "mands," as defined by Skinner. These behavioral components of a message may be quantified in terms of "originality,""redundancy," and "complexity." But the most…

This demonstration of release from proactive interference with young children confirms the suggestion that the technique is appropriate for the study of developmental changes in the encoding of information. (Authors/CB)

Meyer found subjects were faster to determine if a stimulus word was a member of either of two prespecified categories if the categories were close in meaning. A reanalysis of the data favors instead a model emphasizing the role of decision-making processes in categorization and flexibility of task strategies. (CHK)

Research supported in part by the National Institute of Mental Health, grant MH-13515.

Thirty-two intellectually superior and 32 intellectually normal fifth and sixth graders were compared on measures of attention and comprehension of complex verbal stimuli under successive versus simultaneous modes of presentation. Ss were exposed to either successive or simultaneous presentation of printed short stories on slides. Analysis of…