Forced-choice items, investigating the performance of 80 undergraduates on verbal classification and verbal analogy, were sequentially presented, allowing independent estimates of the accuracy of four principle component processes: inference, application, recognition, and distraction. Within-task performance showed substantial individual variation…

Various communication studies have revealed the existence of a "preverbal" stage of communication consisting of centers within the brain that exists in an innate form or a form preprogrammed for future information acquired from the environment through experience (socialization). Such centers serve to prepare the individual for…

A study examined cognitive processing differences between metaphoric and literal sentences. Thirty-three undergraduate students listened to 96 test sentences (including 48 fillers) that expressed 1 meaning in either a novel or frozen metaphorical or literal form: "The old couch was in love with its new slipcover" (novel), "The old couch was at…

Behaviorism cannot adequately explain language processing. A synthesis of the psycholinguistic and information processing approaches of cognitive psychology, however, can provide the basis for a speculative analysis of reading, if this synthesis is tempered by a perceptual learning theory of uncertainty reduction. Theorists of information…

A study was conducted to examine some of the cognitive and linguistic factors that influence metaphor comprehension in young children. Presupposing that (1) the similarities between the topic and the vehicle in a metaphor comprise the metaphor's ground, (2) salience is the degree of prominence of a characteristic in relation to a concept, and (3)…

The techniques for effective listening can be identified by the acronym PAT, which stands for three sets of techniques--physical, attitude, and thinking. Four kinds of physical techniques promote effective listening: appropriate eye contact and normal blinking rate, facial feedback, appropriate body language, and appropriate verbal feedback. Two…

The sentence processing abilities of a conduction aphasic adult woman with a documented phonological coding deficit were investigated in tests of auditory and visual sentence comprehension of reversible active and passive sentences and spatial prepositions, sentence production through story completion and picture description, and repetition of…

Studies in psychology, language, and foreign language suggest that it is the qualitative nature of the task students perform while learning that is important, because of the creativity factor. Some explanations of creativity are concerned with hemisphericity of the brain. Another explanation is that creativity results from divergent rather than…

H.P. Grice's theory of conversation can be used effectively to teach revision in composition courses because it teaches students the rules for effective writing. Grice has formulated a general principle, the Cooperative Principle, based on the assumption that talk-exchanges among speakers are "cooperative efforts" having "a common…

The following papers are included: (1) "The Theoretical and Practical Relevance of Simple Codes in Second Language Acquisition" (Krashen); (2) "Talking to Foreigners versus Talking to Children: Similarities and Differences" (Freed); (3) "The Levertov Machine" (Stevick); (4) "Acquiring a Second Language when You're Not the Underdog" (Edelsky and…

A study investigated the immediate comprehension processes involved in the interpretation of English idiomatic expressions. Idioms such as "bury the hatchet" were presented to 48 college students in sentential contexts that either biased the subject toward a literal or a figurative interpretation or left the interpretation ambiguous. In control…

This paper assesses certain properties of human mental processes by focusing on the tactics utilized in perceiving speech signals. Topics discussed in the paper include the power spectrum approach to fluctuations and noise, with particular reference to biological structures; "l/f-like" fluctuations in speech and music and the functioning of a…

This report examines how the making of inferences plays a role in the comprehension of narratives. The report poses and discusses seven questions: What are inferences? What functions do they perform? What is required to make inferences? What processes are involved? What kinds of inferences are there? How can readers' inferences be assessed? Can…

A taxonomy developed for the study of the growth and development of written language from the perspective of social event was tested with a group of 68 children, aged three to six years. The subjects were presented with a wide variety of environmental print messages (road signs, toys, fast food signs, and household products) and were questioned…

Most methods of literary analysis operate at so high a level of abstraction that the basic meaning is obscured. In the classroom the temptation is to ignore the physical text and to focus attention and discussion on secondary issues which arise out of the text. A distinction needs to be made between reading literature and interpreting or analyzing…