Presents a manually constructed knowledge representation aimed at increasing the effectiveness of information retrieval systems. The framework of first order theories is used to analyze the properties of this new structure. The analysis demonstrates that the retrieval function takes term dependencies into account and distinguishes between…

Analysis of headlines reporting the outcomes of professional and college football games revealed language use patterns involving transitive and intransitive verbs, phrase structure, alliteration and puns, and action verbs. It is suggested that continued use of a verb for winning or losing may lead to a change in its meaning. (Author/CB)

The definition of the suffix "-ard" as giving a negative or pejorative meaning to a word is disputed, and it is proposed that the suffix is simply a particular, socially marked form of expression. (MSE)

When 16 parents' and 13 nonparents' conversations with children were examined for evidence of adults' differential responses to children's syntactic, phonological, and semantic errors, results indicated that adults tended to respond differentially to children's language mistakes, with parents showing greater sensitivity than non-parents. (RH)

The results of a study that examined the semantic and the morph-syntactic awareness of 60 elementary school children are presented. Subjects were given the tasks of substituting a new word for each word indicated in a sentence, and choosing to eliminate any word in a sentence in order to insert a new one. (CFM)

Outlines a theory of metaphor that posits varying levels of semantic processing and formalizes the levels in terms of kinds of semantic mapping operators. Predicted complexity of semantic mapping operators was tested using metaphor interpretations of 204 children aged 6-12 years and 24 adults. Processing score increased predictably with age. (SAK)

Three studies investigated second-, fourth-, and sixth-grade students' understanding of class inclusion hierarchies and the relationship of such understanding to the ability to construct external representations for hierarchically structured information. Children understood hierarchical relations and relations expressed in tree diagrams as early…

Highlights semantic links and shows how the semantic content of hypertext links can be used for information retrieval. Discussion includes indexing and retrieval algorithms that exploit link content and node content; retrieval strategies exploiting semantic links, including conventional retrieval and constrained spreading activation techniques;…

Describes the SAPHIRE (Semantic and Probabilistic Heuristic Information Retrieval Environment) that was developed to identify optimal approaches to indexing, retrieval, and evaluation of information retrieval systems in the biomedical domain. Six evaluation studies that have been done with SAPHIRE are summarized and future challenges are…

Three experiments involving 176 college students assessed the long-term effectiveness of the keyword mnemonic relative to a non-mnemonic (semantic context) learning strategy. The keyword mnemonic produced superior immediate performance, but after two days higher levels of delayed recall were associated with semantic context learning. (SLD)

Study of 3 and 7 year olds and adults examined role that changes in continuity, direction, instrument, and causative agent play in children's and adults' initial assumptions about meaning of novel motion verbs and events. Subjects made similar initial assumptions, but children generalized more conservatively than adults to all change types in…

Discusses the meaning of the terms vowel, consonant, and syllable, focusing on the phonetic and phonological aspects of their definitions. The article points out that teachers of English need to take into account both the phonetic and phonological aspects, while at the same time carefully distinguishing between them. (six references) (MDM)

Proposes a four-category classification of semantic structures of one-step word problems involving multiplication and division: forming the n-th multiple of measures, combinatorial multiplication, composition of operators, and multiplication by formula. This classification is compatible with semantic structures of addition and subtraction word…

A study with three- and five-year olds contrasted two important proposals regarding children's assumptions about word meanings: the taxonomic assumption proposal and the shape bias proposal. Results suggest that perceptual similarity, particularly shape similarity, is very important in early word meaning but that children gradually shift their…

A series of experiments involving over 400 college students performing acoustic-lexical decisions during object naming at different stimulus-onset asynchronies show semantic activation of lexical candidates and phonological activation of target items but no phonological activation of other semantically activated items, supporting a two-stage view…