A taxonomy developed for the study of the growth and development of written language from the perspective of social event was tested with a group of 68 children, aged three to six years. The subjects were presented with a wide variety of environmental print messages (road signs, toys, fast food signs, and household products) and were questioned…

Most methods of literary analysis operate at so high a level of abstraction that the basic meaning is obscured. In the classroom the temptation is to ignore the physical text and to focus attention and discussion on secondary issues which arise out of the text. A distinction needs to be made between reading literature and interpreting or analyzing…

The present study evaluated the effectiveness of embedded headings, with and without instructions on their usage, as processing aids for text material. It was expected that the Instructions/Headings group would outperform both the Headings Only and Control (no instructions or headings) groups, and that the performance of the Headings Only group…

Previous research conducted from a schema theory perspective has neglected those instances where the reader is confronted with unfamiliar text. This issue is addressed, and initial results on training students to acquire and use form schema in processing relatively unfamiliar descriptive prose are presented. Thirty-two college students were…

The skilled performance of conference interpreters has aroused some interest of late, both on the part of interpreters interested in studying their own complex skills, and of psychologists interested in cognitive behavior. Recent theories in this field have concentrated on information processing aspects of the task, and on the role of anticipatory…

This paper discusses the theoretical problem of matching and abstraction of concepts as the processes occur in human minds, and the structures used to represent these processes for use in automated, knowledge based systems. A basic premise of the paper is that hierarchies play a crucial role in structuring knowledge and in solving problems. Data…

Previous research has demonstrated that readers utilize orthographic structure in their perceptual recognition of letter strings. Two experiments were conducted to assess whether this utilization varied with reading ability. Anagrams of words were made to create strings that orthogonally combined high and low single letter positional frequency and…

Two studies were carried out demonstrating the interaction of intonation grouping and meaning relations between words in free recall. When the intonation grouping is in phase with the word relations, recall is facilitated. When it is out of phase, recall is lowered. (Author/RM)

Two detection experiments were conducted with short lists of synthetic speech stimuli where phoneme targets were compared to syllable targets. Results suggest that phonemes and syllables are equally basic to speech perception. (Author/RM)

Reports on children's mastery of one type of sentence structure which is derivationally complex and which has been shown to be psychologically complex as well, given the criteria of both comprehension and acceptability to the native speaker. (HOD)

In a modification of the sentence-picture comprehension task (Chase & Clark, 1972), 70 university undergraduates verified sentence-picture pairs. The findings limit the generalizability of any linguistic comparison model; two different comprehension strategies were used consistently by different subjects, whose choices of strategy were predictable…

Investigates the relationship between memory for prose and the structural characteristics of the semantic representation proposed by Kintsch. Results extend the generality of Kintsch's model across a wide range of ages, and indicate that a proposition is more likely to be recalled when its superordinate is also recalled. (EJS)

Teachers and testers should encourage children to repeat or restate verbal stimuli in order to enhance their comprehension. Changing the administration of a language comprehension test to include such restatement significantly raised the mean test scores of four- and five-year old Head Start children. (CTM)

An experiment is described that involved presenting sentences to the subject for study and then testing single words for recognition (the subject had to decide whether the test word was in one of the study sentences). A large priming effect was obtained. (Author/RM)

Two experiments are described in which reaction times for understanding target sentences or phrases in terms of a preceding context were measured. It is argued that both experiments can be accounted for in terms of contextually generated expectations. (Author/RM)