Effects of disambiguating prior contexts upon processing of lexical ambiguities in sentences were investigated. Subjects listened to lexically ambiguous sentences after a neutral or a disambiguating prior contest, and monitored for phonemes occurring immediately after each ambiguous word. Reaction times were significnatly longer following…

Craik and Lockhart's (1972) levels-of-processing theory has spurred new interest in semantic processing as a factor in memory, particularly with regard to free recall following incidental learning. However, their formulation lacks a clear description of the operations and structures involved in semantic processing. This research outlines a…

Outlines problems encountered in translating the English verb "to affect" into French. (Text is in French.) (CLK)

Describes the utilization of graphic cues, by low-achieving college freshmen, in its relation to syntactic and semantic factors. (JM)

Four experiments dealt with integration of semantic information while reading. Reading and comprehension time of two related sentences in a text was analyzed according to their proximity and relation within the text. A model of textual comprehension is proposed. (CHK)

This study tested predictions from Clark and Haviland's formalization of what people do when integrating information. Subjects were presented with simple sentences issued from a set of complex ideas, and asked to reconstruct the complete ideas. Results support predictions based on a recoding strategy formalized by Clark and Haviland. (CHK)

Subjects learned meanings for 16 invented words and practiced categorizing each word according to its meaning. Each word appeared consistently in either script or uppercase type. Subsequently subjects categorized words in both versions; at first, categorization was slower for unfamiliar versions. Subjects relied on both configuration information…

Points out what children's stories reveal about the significance of the individual word. (DD)

This study examined correlations between hard (low-associate) and easy (high-associate) verbal paired associates and episodic and semantic memory in a mixed clinical sample of 91 male veterans. The study concludes that hard paired-associate learning should not be presumed to measure episodic memory selectively. (SLD)

Examined whether the preferences of verbs for appearing in particular subcategory structures can influence parsing and whether this influence is graded according to the strength of the preferences. Findings suggest that the verb subcategory preferences do produce a graded influence on the parse, according to their strength. (28 references)…

Presents two different types of progressive construction in Spanish and Catalan, one referring to a state or event, and the other to the development of an event. The article argues that the first is predicated of a homogenous period of time, whereas the other is predicated of a period of time divided into consecutive phases. (23 references)…

Analyzes numerous examples of English and German verbs with respect to alternations they undergo and concludes that the semantic classes of verbs that undergo a particular alternation differ between these two languages but that there are some semantic constraints on this variation. The article stresses the limited nature of the study. (Seven…

Argues that adult educators use "learning" when they mean "education" and that this confounds and demeans incidental and informal learning processes. Suggests that intended, purposeful planned learning should properly be termed education and that there is no such thing as a nonlearner. (SK)

Explores the prospects for a "general nativist" theory of first- and second-language acquisition (SLA), outlines a modular acquisition device not including Universal Grammar, and considers the role of universal grammar in the emergence of a first language (L1). (50 references) (Author/CK)

Presents a literature review that covers the following topics related to Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA): (1) LSA overview; (2) applications of LSA, including information retrieval (IR), information filtering, cross-language retrieval, and other IR-related LSA applications; (3) modeling human memory, including the relationship of LSA to other…