Previous research has demonstrated that readers utilize orthographic structure in their perceptual recognition of letter strings. Two experiments were conducted to assess whether this utilization varied with reading ability. Anagrams of words were made to create strings that orthogonally combined high and low single letter positional frequency and…

Two studies were carried out demonstrating the interaction of intonation grouping and meaning relations between words in free recall. When the intonation grouping is in phase with the word relations, recall is facilitated. When it is out of phase, recall is lowered. (Author/RM)

Two detection experiments were conducted with short lists of synthetic speech stimuli where phoneme targets were compared to syllable targets. Results suggest that phonemes and syllables are equally basic to speech perception. (Author/RM)

Reports on children's mastery of one type of sentence structure which is derivationally complex and which has been shown to be psychologically complex as well, given the criteria of both comprehension and acceptability to the native speaker. (HOD)

In a modification of the sentence-picture comprehension task (Chase & Clark, 1972), 70 university undergraduates verified sentence-picture pairs. The findings limit the generalizability of any linguistic comparison model; two different comprehension strategies were used consistently by different subjects, whose choices of strategy were predictable…

Investigates the relationship between memory for prose and the structural characteristics of the semantic representation proposed by Kintsch. Results extend the generality of Kintsch's model across a wide range of ages, and indicate that a proposition is more likely to be recalled when its superordinate is also recalled. (EJS)

Teachers and testers should encourage children to repeat or restate verbal stimuli in order to enhance their comprehension. Changing the administration of a language comprehension test to include such restatement significantly raised the mean test scores of four- and five-year old Head Start children. (CTM)

An experiment is described that involved presenting sentences to the subject for study and then testing single words for recognition (the subject had to decide whether the test word was in one of the study sentences). A large priming effect was obtained. (Author/RM)

Two experiments are described in which reaction times for understanding target sentences or phrases in terms of a preceding context were measured. It is argued that both experiments can be accounted for in terms of contextually generated expectations. (Author/RM)

Two experiments examined characteristics of text that determine when a repeated noun has a clearly identified referent. Verbs and article modifiers appeared to influence whether a noun is merely a repeated word in a text, or whether it is redundant at the propositional level. (SW)

It was hypothesized that if the episodic structure of a story determines subjects' organization of that story in memory, then variation in structure should affect the organization of information in recall. (Author/NCR)

French sentences with a long ambiguous word just before a target phoneme led to faster reaction times than did sentences with a short unambigous word just before the target phoneme. (Author/SW)

How a child answers questions provides information about how he or she processes input. A child's early responses to questions at age one year, three months, were compared to her responses at one year, seven months, when she was in the two-word stage. (SW)

A description of a series of six experiments dealing with human memory processes. They examined the types of codes generated in maintenance rehearsal and the effects of rehearsal time at various single levels of encoding. Data confirmed earlier findings and led to conclusions regarding repetition, encoding and levels of processing. (AMH)

Three experiments investigated whether abstract as well as concrete sentences can be processed in a holistic manner. Results suggest that the processing of both types of sentences involves construction of particularized, holistic mental representations that contain information and inferences based on context and knowledge of language and the…