In researching the potential of cognitive diagnostic assessment, researchers concur that the quality of diagnostic inferences is subject to the extent to which the construct representations based on cognitive skills are theoretically compelling, empirically sound, and relevant to test use. In this paper, I argue that the construction of a Q matrix…

Lexical-semantic access and retrieval was examined in 15 adults diagnosed with schizophrenia and matched controls. This study extends the literature through the inclusion of multiple examinations of lexical-semantic production within the same patient group and through correlating performance on these tasks with various positive and negative…

People can intuitively detect whether a word triad has a common remote associate (coherent) or does not have one (incoherent) before and independently of actually retrieving the common associate. The authors argue that semantic coherence increases the processing fluency for coherent triads and that this increased fluency triggers a brief and…

The present paper integrates the results of experimental studies in which cognitive differences between stuttering and nonstuttering adults were investigated. In a monitoring experiment it was found that persons who stutter encode semantic information more slowly than nonstuttering persons. In dual-task experiments the two groups were compared in…

This study formulates a general semantics theory of societal cohesion, and tests the extent to which general semantics instruction in public schools can alter group attitudes in the directions suggested by the theory. The test instrument, which consists of measurable elements, rationality, acceptance of change, nonprejudice, and…

THE SEMANTIC ANALYSIS OF DELUSIONAL CONCEPTS IN THE INTERVIEW LANGUAGE OF PSYCHOTIC PATIENT IS DESCRIBED. THE TECHNIQUE IS BASED ON THE SEMANTIC DIFFERENTIAL DEVISED BY OSGOOD, SUCI, AND TANNENBAUM. COMPUTATIONAL PROCEDURES ARE USED FOR THE DETECTION OF CLUSTERS OF KEYWORDS. THESE CLUSTERS PROVIDE A "NATURAL" CLASSIFICATION OF PEOPLE AND…

Major purpose of the experiments was to use an instrumental response to study the form of semantic generalization gradients obtained following single-cue and discrimination training procedures. (Authors)

In this article, the authors explore semantic context effects in speaking. In particular, the authors investigate a marked discrepancy between categorically and associatively induced effects; only categorical relationships have been reported to cause interference in object naming. In Experiments 1 and 2, a variant of the semantic blocking paradigm…

Two explanations for deficits underlying autism were tested: weak central coherence (WCC) and executive dysfunction. Consistent with WCC, Happe ("British Journal of Developmental Psychology" 15 (1997) 1) found that children with autism failed to use sentence context in pronouncing homographs. In an alternate approach, we investigated whether…

Children's developing understanding that words have conventional meanings and objects have conventional functions emerges in parent-child activity and conversation. Drawing on family conversations in everyday settings, the chapter explores an apparent paradox between a global analysis of conventionality as stable shared knowledge and a local…

Research on AAC symbols has focused almost exclusively on iconicity and complexity, and thus has not established whether additional visual features are necessary for conveying meaning in graphic representations. Despite variations in individual depictions of an "apple," we understand the underlying concept due to shared consensus on the set of…

The word-frequency effect (WFE) in recognition memory refers to the finding that more rare words are better recognized than more common words. We demonstrate that a familiarity-discrimination model operating on data from a semantic word-association space yields a robust WFE in data on both hit rates and false-alarm rates. Our modeling results…

The purpose of this study was to determine the natural order of acquisition of the proform "it," comparing deictic pronoun "it," anaphoric pronoun "it" and expletive "it." Files from four children (Adam, Eve, Nina and Peter) aged 1 ; 6-3 ; 0 in the CHILDES database were coded for occurrences of NP it (here it is) and expletive it (it's raining).…

Whilst findings from experimental studies suggest that perceptual mechanisms underpinning musical cognition are preserved or enhanced in autism, little is known about how higher-level, structural aspects of music are processed. Twenty participants with autism, together with age and intelligence matched controls, completed a musical priming task in…

Five experiments used ERPs and eye tracking to determine the interplay of word-level and discourse-level information during sentence processing. Subjects read sentences that were locally congruent but whose congruence with discourse context was manipulated. Furthermore, critical words in the local sentence were preceded by a prime word that was…