For the exploratory analysis of a matrix of proximities or (dis)similarities between objects, one often uses cluster analysis (CA) or multidimensional scaling (MDS). Solutions resulting from such analyses are sometimes interpreted using external information on the objects. Usually the procedures of CA, MDS and using external information are…

A label can convey nonobvious information about category membership. Three studies show that preschoolers (N144) sometimes ignore or reject labels that conflict with appearance, particularly when they are uncertain that the speaker meant to use those labels. In Study 1, 4-year-olds were more reluctant than 3-year-olds to accept that, for example,…

The author, as a library media specialist, admitted that she needed more study on library organization despite three years of teaching Dewey to her elementary students. To be more accurate, she realized she needed a clearer understanding of what Mr. Melvil Dewey had in mind when he devised his plan for organizing books and information in the…

Edward Frankland and Norman Lockyer researched upon a gaseous spectra in relation to the physical constitution of the sun and named it as "helium" (from Greek "helios" meaning "sun"). Since Lockyer apparently never formally proposed the name in print, it is not known why he chose to use a metallic end "ium".

In this article, I survey the integrated connectionist/symbolic (ICS) cognitive architecture in which higher cognition must be formally characterized on two levels of description. At the microlevel, parallel distributed processing (PDP) characterizes mental processing; this PDP system has special organization in virtue of which it can be…

The virtual pedagogical space that is a home to ten thousands of English courses in the United States and abroad and is referred to the software application called Blackboard is discussed. The ways in which Blackboard as a socially produced and producing space undermined many of the currently professed goal of English studies is illustrated.

In 4 experiments, the authors found evidence for negatively signed masked semantic priming effects (with category names as primes and exemplars as targets) using a new technique of presenting the masked primes. By rapidly interchanging prime and mask during the stimulus onset asynchrony, they increased the total prime exposure to a level…

This qualitative study investigates the existence of cultural themes in classrooms serving low-income African American students. A classification scheme categorizing classroom dynamics that evidenced cultural themes is developed and used to record teachers and students' behaviors. Four hundred sixty classroom observations are specified to either a…

Rule use in perceptual classification was investigated in adults and in 4- to 12-year-old children. Two studies of performance on triad classification tasks with large samples (N=226 and N=328) are presented to (a) contrast theoretical predictions from the holistic-to-analytic-shift theory (Smith & Kemler, 1977) and the differential-sensitivity…

The most effective teaching strategies require higher order thinking, but the most used strategies seem to involve lower order thinking. If a comparison could be made between the cognitive rigor of the content standards that students are to be learning and the cognitive rigor of the actual work students are doing, then these kind of data are…

Propensity score analysis is a relatively recent statistical innovation that is useful in the analysis of data from quasi-experiments. The goal of propensity score analysis is to balance two non-equivalent groups on observed covariates to get more accurate estimates of the effects of a treatment on which the two groups differ. This article…

Two experiments are reported using a visual familiarization categorization procedure. In both experiments, infants were familiarized with sets of stimuli previously shown to contain asymmetric feature distributions that support an asymmetry in young infants' categorization of cats and dogs (i.e. infants' cat category excludes dogs but their dog…

This issue of "Bilingualism: Language and Cognition" is about convergence, a type of language change that is contact-induced and results in greater similarity between two languages that are in contact with each other. In Backus (forthcoming), I have attempted an overview of contact-induced language change, focusing on causal factors, on mechanisms…

Does function facilitate categorization by focusing infants' attention generally on all commonalities among objects or specifically on functionally relevant properties? After familiarization to a novel category, 18-month-olds selected another category member from a pair of previously unseen test objects. In Experiments 1 and 2, infants chose…

The present research was aimed to reply and extend several recent findings showing qualitatively different behavioral effects produced by words perceived with vs. without awareness. Participants made a semantic categorization task on a target that was preceded by a prime word belonging either to the same (20% of trials) or to a different category…