Children often confuse what is said and what is meant in referential communication. Five- and six-year olds were exposed as listeners or evaluators to a message in which they were either aware or not aware of the referent intended. Found that only six-year olds benefited from instructions to focus on the literal meaning of the message. (BC)

Examines the impact of perceived token resistance and previous sexual contact on men's discrimination of when a female wants her partner to stop his sexual advances. Results of a study of male college students (n=100) indicate that when resistance is perceived to be token, the subjects took significantly longer to determine that the man should…

This study, with 43 boys ages 8-12, found that children with relatively high concentrations of lead in their hair reacted significantly slower in a simple reaction-time task than did children with relatively low concentrations of lead in their hair. In addition, the former were significantly less flexible in changing their focus of attention.…

Two experiments investigated morphological decomposition in ambiguous novel compounds such as "busheater," which can be parsed as either "bus-heater" or "bush-heater." It was found that subjects' parsing choices for such words are influenced by orthographic constraints but that these constraints do not operate…

Compared the sentence processing abilities of 19 children with language impairments (LIs) against those of 20 children without impairments. Results found that the children with LIs had significantly longer mean response times under sentence conditions and lower accuracy overall than children without LIs. (29 references) (MDM)

Measures of four-choice reaction time, inspection time, and scores on a speeded coding-substitution task obtained from 104 adults aged 54 to 85 years were found to account for almost all age-related changes in cognitive performance on a number of indices of general fluid ability. (SLD)

Two studies examined college students' ability, when presented with two sequential adjectives, to make relatedness judgments and antonym and synonym judgments. The studies found that judgments were fastest for direct antonyms, even when compared to synonyms of similar relatedness. (Contains 17 references.) (MDM)

Navy recruits (n=243) participated in an examination of the relationship between strategy use and intelligence through paper-and-pencil and computer-administered tests that considered reaction time. Overall, results weaken arguments that strategy use is related to general intelligence and that strategy use is a robust, traitlike construct. (SLD)

The relationship between general intelligence and the ability to ignore irrelevant stimuli appearing in the same visual field as an attended target was studied for 167 college students. Results indicate that psychometric intelligence does not tap visual focused attention. (SLD)

The study, with 32 adolescents with mild mental retardation and controls, found that imagery practice facilitated the execution of the reaction time component of a motor task and sometimes facilitated performance of the movement time component of the motor task. (DB)

Developed Death Anxiety Scale for Children (DASC), instrument to explore children's responses to death and dying. Constructed scale of neutral and anxiety producing words. Established validity by reading words to children and recording galvanic skin response, response time, and pulse rate. Found that children responded with greater skin resistance…

Event-related potentials (ERPs) of children and adults were measured while subjects observed pictures of facial expressions. Adults had greater ERP responses to happy than to angry faces, whereas children had greater ERP responses to angry than to happy faces. (BC)

In 2 studies with 85 and 88 undergraduates, respectively, peripheral nerve conduction velocity (NCV) was significantly correlated with IQ score and reaction times, and NCV and reaction time contributed significantly, in combination, to prediction of IQ. Results are interpreted in terms of a neural efficiency model of intelligence. (Author/SLD)

Thirteen university students listened to synthesized vowels, presented 14 times randomly, and uttered each of the vowels as soon as they heard it. Serial analysis of successive auditory-vocal reaction times (AVRTs) revealed significant intrasession and intersession decreases in AVRTs in the majority of subjects. AVRT increases were also seen but…

Tested infants' latency in turning toward stimulus patterns and the duration of their initial fixation. Results showed that "turning latency" fell in a linear manner from 36 to 120 weeks after conception. Fixation time fell abruptly at 53 weeks. Preterm and full-term infants showed the same developmental trends. (BC)