This paper discusses problems and approaches in assessing intercultural variation in the affective impact of visual aspects of screen media (film and filmstrips). As a first step in approaching the problem, a semantic differential was used to compare responses of Spanish-speaking and English-speaking samples. Each group saw two films and one…

This investigation examined strategic and semantic aspects of the answers given by preschool children to class inclusion problems. The Piagetian logical formalism for class inclusion was contrasted with a new, problem processing formalism in three experiments. In experiment 1, it was found that 48 nursery school subjects nearly always performed…

Nouns are generally recalled and recognized better in memory tasks, although several theoretical positions and a variety of empirical tasks indicate the importance of verbs to sentences. To try to resolve this paradox, several experiments were designed to explore the efficiency of various sentence elements as cues in recognition memory. Subjects…

This study attempted to determine if reading ability and grade level differences accounted for differences in the word associations and written syntactic structures of 180 selected students. The study also investigated the relationship of semantic associations and syntactic complexity. An oral, free word association test was used to measure…

This investigation relates to the research questions: (1) Do college students' perceptions of the dangerousness of specific drugs now parallel the government's listed ranking? (2) Where do legal drugs fall on the continuum of perceived dangerousness? (3) What might be good dimensions to characterize perceptions? (4) What is the relationship among…

This paper attempts to characterize some of the knowledge that people have of their language's semantic structure, in order to determine what a computer has to know to perform the operations of searching for facts and answering questions. Necessarily, this sort of semantic analysis is done in connection with syntactic structure. The meaningful…

When a grammar is expressed in augmented transition network (ATN) form, the problem of detecting syntactic ambuguity reduces to finding all possible paths through the ATNs. Each successfully terminating path through the ATN generates an acceptable parsing of the input string. Two ATN forms, minimal-node and pseudo-tree, are described along with…

Reported is a study to determine whether various attitudinal concepts changed in meaning during a specific college phsyical science course and whether various sub-groups within the total group had different initial conceptual frames of reference. The concepts studied were science teachers, the investigator himself as a science student, scientists,…

Aspects of syntax and semantics which affect sentence comprehensibility were investigated for their effects on children's understanding of the dependency relationship of subordinate to main clauses in sentences. Children in grades 2, 4, 6, and 8 were asked to select the main content from orally presented sentences by checking a picture which…

The first part of this dissertation is a metatheoretical discussion of the needs and means of semantic analysis. This discussion includes sections on metalanguage, deep and surface structure and structural semantics, and procedures for relating the English of abstracts to a classification concordance in the same language. The second part describes…

A comparison of the syntactic characteristics of mathematical equations and Eskimo syntax is made, and a proposal that Eskimo has a level of structure similar to that of equations is described. P:t performative contrast is reanalyzed. Questions and speculations on the formal treatment of this type of structure in transformational grammar, and its…

Earlier training attempts to prevent drug abuse were predicated on a cognitive-behavior link. Increased information generally resulted in more positive attitudes toward drug use. An educational alternative which may intervene in drug taking behavior is Value-Sharing. Parents in a Value-Sharing course were administered a form of the Semantic…

This study investigates children's semantic integration of sentence information as a function of instructions (form or substance), test sentence form (verbatim or paraphrased from acquisition story sentences), and story content (spatial or general relationships). After 144 fifth-grade children were presented with twelve short acquisition stories,…

During the past fifteen years, a variety of linguistic analyses of the tense and aspect systems of dialects of English has been conducted. These analyses were bounded by several analytic dimensions. This paper treats three of these dimensions and discusses their interrelationships and implications in relation to two dialects--Black English and…

Language teaching requires textbook material that contains the most frequent concepts of a language. The computer brings its tremendous information processing ability to the task of establishing word frequency rankings, but the computer is limited to counting word-forms and not semantic concepts. The most recent word frequency dictionaries, in…