To investigate the semantic organization of bilinguals, multi-dimensional scaling was applied to a series of direct pair comparisons among a group of symbols from both languages. Results indicate that semantic content is the primary determinant of the bilingual's semantic structure. (Author/AM)

The present study replicated the procedure of Kausler et al. (1975) as a means of testing further the hypothesis that the processing of wrong items differs qualitatively, as well as quantitatively, from the processing of right items. (Author)

Based on a corpus made up of written descriptions of comic strips done by elementary level children. Elements most frequently mentioned by the children are identified in order to relate referential content to sociocultural factors. (Text is in French.) (CDSH/AM)

Discusses the change in the use of the address form "Frau" in German caused by the change in the social roles of women. (TL)

These experiments attempts to confirm the selective encoding processes thought to underlie orienting tasks and to shed some light on the empirical discrepancy as to whether semantic encoding inhibits or facilitates recognition performance in general, and the identification of distractor items in particular. (Author/RK)

Author advocates the view that meaning is necessarily dependent upon the communicative function of language and examines the objections, particularly those of Noam Chomsky, to this view. Argues that while Chomsky disagrees with the idea that communication is the essential function of language, he implicitly agrees that it has a function.…

Third- and sixth-grade readers were asked to label sets of pictures printed with distracting words (either nouns, adjectives, or functors) and nonsense syllables. (Author/JMB)

A sociolinguistic approach was utilized to describe the semantic-pragmatic component of language in the spontaneous communication of four hearing impaired preschool children. (Author)

Open-system words (nouns, verbs, adjectives) can function as exponents of a clause relation and be predictive of the organization of written discourse while closed-system words (a, the, and, because, etc.) cannot. Supporting criteria are presented. (DAG)

Describes Albert Camus's writings regarding semantic abuses in public rhetoric. (DD)

This study investigated the development of understanding of animate and inanimate items in 52 children between 4 and 7 years of age. (Author/JMB)

Language disabled (LD) and average (N=40) six- and eight-year-olds were evaluated on the ability to detect multiple word meanings in ambiguous sentences with and without picture clues and to identify appropriate word meaning by sentence context. LD students did not show average growth in these abilities over the two-year age span. (Author/DB)

Two experiments investigated sentence context effects on the naming times of sentence completion words by third-grade children and college students. The semantic acceptability of the word in the sentence context had a much greater influence on children's word identification times than adults'. (Author/CB)

Four new military training systems offer the opportunity for the application of cognitive science. They are the following: (1) a family of memorization games; (2) a simulator with a graphic, schematic student interface; (3) a system for solving problems of relative motion; and (4) a method of building cognitive skills for air-intercept control.…

Examines the covariational relationships believed to exist between behaviors and traits, relationships which play a particularly crucial role in both impression formation and competence evaluation. Concludes that trait-behavior relationships are, with one exception, similar across competence level and communicative situation. (RS)