A brief summary of research findings which support the hypothesis of scriptal knowledge structures in children and which indicates that children use such structures in ways very similar to those of adults is provided in this paper. Research reveals that when children as young as three are asked to tell what they know about events, they tend to…

Describes a means of characterizing one of many semantic aspects of young children's comprehension ("necessity for linking"). This semantic aspect is then used to experimentally clarify sentence processing results that are ambiguous at the syntactic level. (HOD)

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)

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)

Reading comprehension is an active inferential process. Three experiments are described in which the possibility was examined that highly probable inferences are drawn, even when they are unnecessary for comprehension. (Author/RM)

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)

When subjects are tested on ordered information, performance is better on inferences than on information actually presented during training. Humphreys suggested that superiority on inferences derives from differential frequency. This experiment refutes that position, demonstrating that superiority on inferences is observed even when frequency is…

Predictions derived from an organizational interpretation of transfer in a part-whole free-recall paradigm were tested via a procedure which allowed manipulation of part- and whole-list organizational compatibility and extent of part-list organization. (Author/SW)

Three new experiments concerning the depth-of-processing view demonstrate that repetition at the phonemic depth of processing does facilitate memory, regardless of whether the repetitions are massed or distributed and regardless of whether the dependent variable is uncued recall, cued recall or recognition. (Author/RM)

Discusses a study that examines which combination of animate and inanimate actors (anyone or anything performing an action) and patients (the thing that is the object of action) two-year-olds view as prototypical. Results suggest that the actor category is usually acquired first for prototypical sentences with animate actors and inanimate…

Discusses two studies that examine whether children are sensitive to the fact that adjectives and nouns differ in the contrast they imply. Results show that by age four, children are sensitive to this. Implications for children's use of referential language and word learning strategies are discussed. (SED)

Describes a study that analyzes the naturalistic productions of "because" and "so" by 96 children, aged three-and-a-half to nine-and-a-half years of age, while narrating personal events. Analyzes results in terms of such factors as: correctness, types of causality, nature of actor/recipient, time of causality, producer, and linguistic issues. (SED)

Discusses experiments that investigated the sources of knowledge that are employed in spoken word identification. The interactive assumption that normal spoken word identification processes require the presence of semantic and syntactic context and the special status given to word-initial acoustic-phonetic information in cohort theory were…

Explores the concept of emergent literacy, discussing what children know about reading and writing, how they come to know it, and what this information means for classroom practices and school policy. (MM)