The experiments reported here led to the conclusion that changing the semantic context in which a noun appears by pairing it with a different adjective negatively affects a subject's ability to recognize the noun. (FWB)

Investigates preschool children's ability to discriminate and categorize facial expressions. Four sets of drawings of faces depicted expressions of joy, sadness, surprise, and anger. Each set of drawings contained a "standard" face as well as five choices from which to select a match. (Author/RH)

Discusses three experiments which provide evidence for the conclusions that hypermnesia (increased recall with repeated testing) does not depend on the encoding of material in an imaginal format but is related to the level of recall across conditions within an experiment. (EKN)

Two-year-old children's memory for locations of hidden objects was examined in four cue conditions. Pictures marked hidden-object locations in three of these conditions, and either depicted or were related associatively to hidden objects. In the fourth condition, only blank cards were presented with the objects. (Author/SS)

Three age groups (ages 20, 45, and 65 years) indicated whether they owned each of 30 commercial memory aids and rated usefulness of each aid. Each age group used or perceived certain aids as more useful than did other groups. Results suggest that memory aid usage differs with age partly because memory tasks required changes with life stage.…

Investigates to what extent children at different stages of development use large units such as rimes and small units such as phonemes and graphemes of sound-to-spell correspondence. Finds (1) children do not always make use of the analogy strategy; and (2) when the potential to use rime-based units is highlighted by task demands, young children…

The inhibition of return (IOR) phenomenon is routinely considered an effect of reflexive attention because the paradigm used to generate IOR employs peripheral cues that are uninformative as to where a target will appear. Because the cues are spatially unreliable it is thought that there is no reason for attention to be committed volitionally to…

The current experiment investigated the effect of differential training histories on responses to a 5-term linear chain of nonsense syllables (described here with sequential, alphabetical characters; A [is less than] B [is less than] C [is less than] D [is less than] E) across unreinforced probe trials. Participants' responses to nonarbitrary…

Recognising the grammatical categories of words is a necessary skill for the acquisition of syntax and for on-line sentence processing. The syntactic and semantic context of the word contribute as cues for grammatical category assignment, but phonological cues, too, have been implicated as important sources of information. The value of…

Evidence has been mixed on whether speakers spontaneously and reliably produce prosodic cues that resolve syntactic ambiguities. And when speakers do produce such cues, it is unclear whether they do so ''for'' their addressees (the "audience design" hypothesis) or ''for'' themselves, as a by-product of planning and articulating utterances. Three…