Two experiments are described in which subjects read short passages containing an adjective-category noun reference (e.g., wooden toy) to an antecedent in the text (wooden block). In half the passages a nonantecedent example of the category also appeared in the text (rubber ball). The presence of this nonantecedent distractor generally slowed reading time for the anaphoric reference, but this interference effect interacted with the typicality of the examples. No interference effect was obtained when the antecedent was a typical example of the adjective-category phrase and the nonantecedent distractor was not typical. The results suggest that, while prenominal adjectives can be used to select the intended antecedent quickly, the adjectives do not actually prevent the nonantecedent distractors from being accessed.

The role of organization in adults' processing of stories was examined. Young, middle-aged, and old adults were asked to recall or make importance judgments about canonical stories, in which the order of mention of events corresponded to their order in the underlying structure of the story, and noncanonical stories, in which the order of mention of events did not correspond to their underlying order. Canonical stories were better recalled than noncanonical stories by all three age groups, and a variety of measures indicated that older adults' recall was both quantitatively and qualitatively similar to that of young adults. In addition, the three age groups made similar judgments of importance. The results are discussed in terms of developmental differences in processing of schematically organized stimuli versus stimuli that lack a schematic organization and in terms of the development and maintenance of metacognitive knowledge.

The present study compared memory of both young adults and elderly adults for frequency information under true incidental and intentional memory conditions that differed with respect to the presence or absence of rehearsal strategies. The paradigm involved a short-term memory task for which the distractor words verbalized during the retention interval varied in frequency of occurrence. Prior knowledge of the frequency judgment test for the distractor items (intentional memory) lowered short-term memory proficiency, particularly for elderly adults, but had no effect on frequency judgments, relative to the absence of prior knowledge of the frequency test (incidental memory), for both young and elderly adults. Elderly adults were less proficient than young adults on both the short-term memory task and the frequency judgment task.

It is hypothesized that people use formally incorrect deductive procedures, and this is sometimes advisable. The particular “prototypicality heuristic” investigated is: to determine validity of a proof, (a) work out an example, and (b) pick a “good” rather than arbitrary example. An interaction was predicted between validity of inference and prototypicality of example. Experiment 1, although quite sensitive to “calibration” variables, does not reveal the interaction in reaction times. However, Experiment 2, in which subjects' time was limited, seems to elicit the interaction in subjects' first-trial confidence judgments; the explanation proposed is that subjects then decide they must shift to a “quick and dirty” heuristic. Experiment 3 provides some preliminary evidence that subjects' “metaheuristic” decision to use the heuristic does lower error rates.

Young adults are generally better than older adults at remembering information from text materials. Previous research investigating the nature of these differences has produced conflicting results. Two sets of variables that influence age-related patterns of text recall are examined in the present study. Specifically, the effects of verbal ability level and text structure variables (number of arguments in the text and level of information in the text) on the text recall of younger (20–39 years), middle-aged (40–57 years), and older (60–84 years) adults are investigated. The subjects read and recalled short texts on health and nutrition. Subjects' recall protocols were scored according to the propositional system of W. Kintsch (The Representation of Meaning in Memory, 1974, Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum). Age differences in the discovery and utilization of the organizational structure of texts were found to be mediated by both subject ability and text structure variables. Specifically, for adults with low verbal ability, age-related differences in recall were greater for the main ideas than for the details of the texts. For adults with high verbal ability the reverse was true. Finally, the hypothesis that age differences in recall would be minimized when there were fewer arguments or concepts in the text received only modest support.

Three experiments compared different memory tests for words that were studied under either semantic or nonsemantic processing conditions. When the tests required the completion of the initial letters (e.g., DEF—) of recently presented words with the first word that came to mind, semantic and nonsemantic processing conditions produced similar results. In contrast, free recall, cued recall, and word recognition showed substantially better performance under semantic processing conditions. The rate of decrement in performance over time was the same for the completion and recognition tests. The findings are discussed in terms of two processes: (a) activation of a mental representation, which also strengthens the relations among its components and increases its accessibility, and (b) elaboration, which establishes relations among different mental contents and increases retrievability. Implications for different memory tests and for understanding the amnesic syndrome are developed.

Two experiments are presented in support of the hypothesis that various syntactic constructions hierarchize along a continuum which codes the degree of topic continuity in a discourse. In the first experiment subjects were asked to rewrite two short sentences as a single long sentence. They were allowed to rephrase the second sentence to make their new, combined sentence sound natural. The form of the referent in the second sentence was found to depend on its continuity with the topic of the other sentence. Subjects tended to use unmarked linguistic forms in cases of high topic continuity and marked forms when there was a topic shift. In the second experiment subjects were asked to interpret discourse fragments which contained ambiguous referents. The less marked the form of the referent was, the more likely subjects were to interpret it as coreferential with the preceding topic.

In recent years there has been a good deal of debate about the role of rote, repetitive rehearsal (called Type I or maintenance rehearsal) on the establishment of memory traces that outlast the rehearsal process itself. One advance in the technology used to study this problem is the operational definition of maintenance rehearsal proposed by Glenberg and Adams (1978, Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 17, 455-463). These authors argued that maintenance rehearsal should be defined as the continuous maintenance of information in memory using minimal cognitive capacity. Here this definition was adopted and extended in a paradigm in which the mental resources devoted to maintenance rehearsal could be systematically varied. The experiment revealed that there is, indeed, an effect of maintenance rehearsal on long-term recognition performance and that this effect depends on the mental resources devoted to the rehearsal process. The functions of rehearsal are two in number: to maintain information in a temporarily active state during short-term tasks and to create memory traces with some permanence. The latter of these functions has often been attributed to the class of processes called elaborative rehearsal, processes such as chunking, forming images, or recoding material in various ways. However, various sources of evidence have been accumulating to suggest that maintenance rehearsal--mainly rote repetitionmay also play some role in creating longer term memories. If this finding is correct, it is significant for two reasons. From a practical point of view, rote repetition is the strategy that is probably used most frequently as a mnemonic, so it is important

The extent to which certain co-referential and structural constraints are reflected in the anaphoric noun phrases of written narratives produced by more and less skilled upper-elementary writers is investigated. To control for co-referential context, subjects wrote about events pictured in two cartoons, constructed so as to afford different opportunities for unambiguous pronoun use. Analyses assess effects of the two co-referential contexts as well as effects of changes in thematic focus on noun phrases. Results indicate that (as predicted) poor writers are relatively insensitive to the constraints of the more difficult coreferential context, but that (unexpectedly) poor writers are as sensitive as good writers to the effects of changes in thematic focus. Possible reasons for these differences are considered.

Subjects read paragraphs which contained explicit summarizing statements expressing a macroproposition. They were then given a word recognition test. When two words from the summarizing statement were presented on successive trials on the recognition test, responses to the second word were faster and more likely to be correct than for word pairs from a sentence from the microstructure of the text, which in turn were faster (but with equal error rates) than responses to test words from different sentences. When the summarizing statements were omitted from the paragraphs, macrowords had a higher false alarm rate and longer reaction times than thematically related distractor items, while thematically unrelated distractors produced the smallest false alarm rate and the fastest responses. These results were obtained whether or not subjects were required to write a summary before taking the recognition test. It was concluded that subjects form macrostructures during reading as an integral component of the comprehension process, and not just in response to certain task demands.

Linguistic and behavioral evidence suggests that the syllable is composed of two major constituents, an onset and a rime . The onset is the initial consonant or consonant cluster. The rime is the remainder of the syllable, excepting any inflectional endings or appendices . The internal structure of the rime was studied in four experiments. When an obstruent followed the vowel, subjects most readily divided the rime between the vowel and the obstruent. Thus, final consonant clusters beginning with obstruents formed cohesive units. Postvocalic liquids were grouped with the vowel rather than the final consonant. Postvocalic nasals were intermediate. These results are consistent with linguistic notions of a sonority hierarchy, by which classes of consonants differ in their affinity with vowels.

Three experiments showed that silent mouthing or lipreading of immediate-memory lists leads to modality and suffix effects of the sort formerly believed to occur only following auditory presentation. Although lip-read and mouthed suffixes interfered somewhat with recency recall of auditory items, and vice versa, the suffix effect was greatest when the modality of the suffix matched exactly that of the test items. These findings are inconsistent with previous assumptions about sensory memory (precategorical acoustic storage). Specifically, it now seems likely that gestural information relevant to the synthesis of auditory features can also be held in a precategorical store specialized for auditory feature detection.

Two experiments examined the tendency for subjects to falsely recognize script-based concepts after reading incomplete script-based texts. On an immediate recognition test, both the hypothesized position of a concept in the reader's preexperimental knowledge structure (central, peripheral) and the number of times the concept was implied in the text (0, 1, 3, or 5) affected the reader's judgments about whether the concept had been presented in the text. For central concepts, the number of text implications had no significant effect on either error rates or judgment times. For peripheral concepts, error rates and response times were dependent on the number of text implications. These findings were interpreted as evidence for selective activation of concepts within scripts.

Four experiments examined how irregularities in spelling or in the correspondence between spelling and sound influence two reading tasks, naming and lexical decision. The words studied included regular (e.g., must ), exception ( have ), regular inconsistent ( gave ), and “strange” (words with unusual spelling patterns such as aisle or fuel ). The results indicate that the two factors have separate effects on recognition. Irregular spelling influences performance on both tasks, while irregular spelling—sound correspondences only influence reading aloud. However, all of these effects are restricted to lower frequency words. The processing of both high and low frequency words, as well as the task differences, can be accommodated by a model that considers the time course of the activation of orthographic and phonological information.

In most models of categorization, the properties of category members are assumed to be independent of one another. Several sources of evidence suggest, however, that this assumption may be false, and furthermore, that the nonindependence of properties may have important consequences for categorization. In the experiments presented here, it was demonstrated that properties of natural categories occur in systematic relation to one another rather than independently. Property relations did not seem to influence typicality judgments when the potential impact was assessed using models similar to those in the concept-learning literature. In a further experiment, under different conditions, property relations did influence typicality, suggesting that knowledge of such relationships may mainly concern certain particularly salient or functional combinations.

Two experiments are reported in which sentence-by-sentence reading times were collected on two-sentence paragraphs, where the first sentence specified a cause for the event in the second sentence. Each paragraph had four versions. All versions had the same second sentence and were referentially coherent; they differed, however, in the causal relatedness of the two sentences. Despite referential coherence, reading times for second sentences were shown to steadily increase as causal relatedness decreased. Recognition and recall memory for the causes was poorest for the most and least related causes and best for causes of intermediate levels of relatedness.

Three experiments are described in which input direction of a pair of script statements was manipulated. It was shown that subjects process statements faster when they were presented in a forward direction which reflects the causal dependencies between them than when they were presented in a backward direction which reverses the typical order of actions. In Experiments 1 and 2 subjects performed a relatedness judgment for pairs of script statements faster for forward than for backward pairs. In Experiment 3, where a reading and recognition task was used, target sentences were studied faster in forward than in backward pairs. The forward advantage observed in these experiments is interpreted in terms of a “Bundle” model of script representation and in terms of the causal dependency between the script actions.

Linguistic and psycholinguistic accounts based on the study of English may prove unreliable as guides to sentence processing in even closely related languages. The present study illustrates this claim in a test of sentence interpretation by German-, Italian-, and English-speaking adults. Subjects were presented with simple transitive sentences in which contrasts of (1) word order, (2) agreement, (3) animacy, and (4) stress were systematically varied. For each sentence, subjects were asked to state which of the two nouns was the actor. The results indicated that Americans relied overwhelming on word order, using a first-noun strategy in NVN and a second-noun strategy in VNN and NNV sentences. Germans relied on both agreement and animacy. Italians showed extreme reliance on agreement cues. In both German and Italian, stress played a role in terms of complex interactions with word order and agreement. The findings were interpreted in terms of the “competition model” of Bates and MacWhinney (in H. Winitz (Ed.), Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences Conference on Native and Foreign Language Acquisition . New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 1982) in which cue validity is considered to be the primary determinant of cue strength. According to this model, cues are said to be high in validity when they are also high in applicability and reliability.

In three experiments bilingual subjects were presented stimuli consisting of a target word surrounded above and below by two copies of a to-be-ignored flanker word. Words from four semantic categories were used; two of the categories were assigned to one response while the other two categories were assigned to the second response. The language of the target and flanker words differed on all trials in Experiments 1 and 2 (cross-language flankers), while Experiment 3 involved a comparison between the effects of cross-language and same-language flankers. It was found that target response times were affected by the meaning of the to-be-ignored flanker words, both when the targets and flankers were printed in the same language (Experiment 3) and when they were printed in different languages (Experiments 1–3). It was concluded that this finding is difficult to reconcile with the view that bilinguals possess an “input switch” which operates to switch on processing in just one of their language systems at a time.

The present experiment investigated reconstructive recall for linguistic style. It was hypothesized that (a) features of linguistic style would be difficult to recall compared to underlying content; (b) reconstructive errors would include stylistic forms recalled as standard forms when subjects lacked productive control of a particular feature of a style; (c) reconstructive errors would include standard forms recalled as stylistic forms when subjects with productive control of a style attempted to style match. Subjects carried out recall tasks with texts of five different styles (business, biblical, academic, legal, primer). Objective procedures were developed to classify the style of the reconstructed responses and the results showed that a large proportion of the total responses consisted of the predicted types of reconstructive errors. The reconstructive-style hypothesis was used to integrate a range of experimental findings from studies of memory for text.

Task-linked reading strategies were studied in adults and fifth graders who read sentences for retention (verbatim recall) or for comprehension (true—false responses to statements). Word-by-word reading times (RTs) were analyzed for nine linguistic indices that reflect the coding of individual words, of structure, and of meaning. For the recall task, the adult RTs primarily reflected the syntactic structure, as illustrated by prolonged phrase boundary RTs, and significant RT differences between lexical and copular verbs, and between sentences with and without embedded relative clauses. For the comprehension task, the adult RTs primarily reflected the semantic content, as illustrated by semantic integration and facilitation scores. However, for children, both the structure and meaning indices were higher for recall than comprehension subjects. Further, children from both task groups appear to use reading strategies that involve mixtures of adult components.

A series of five experiments addressed the question of whether pictures and the words that name them access a common conceptual representation. In the first three experiments the processing of words in the lexical decision task was compared with the processing of pictured objects in a formally analogous task which we called the object decision task. The results showed that the lexical and object decision tasks produce approximately similar response latencies and are similar in their sensitivity to a set of experimental manipulations (e.g., frequency effects, interference effects, semantic facilitation from related words or pictures). In two additional experiments the processing of words was compared with that of pictures in a mixed reality decision task in which a decision about whether a word or picture represents a real thing is to be made independent of the surface form. The results indicated that subjects were unable to make amodal decisions of this sort; the response latencies in reality decision were markedly longer than those in either a pure lexical or pure object decision and there was little conceptual transfer across repetitions of different surface forms. Overall, the results of the five experiments suggest that the major component in a lexical or object decision is a form-specific memory representation of the word or visual object.

The results of five experiments on the nature of the speech code and on the role of sentence context on speech processing are reported. The first three studies test predictions from the dual code model of phoneme identification (Foss, D. J., & Blank, M. A. Cognitive Psychology, 1980, 12, 1-31). According to that model, subjects in a phoneme monitoring experiment respond to a prelexical code when engaged in a relatively easy task, and to a postlexical code when the task is difficult. The experiments controlled ease of processing either by giving subjects multiple targets for which to monitor or by preceding the target with a similar-sounding phoneme that draws false alarms. The predictions from the model were not sustained. Furthermore, evidence for a paradoxical nonword superiority effect was observed. In Experiment IV reaction times (RTs) to all possible /d/-initial CVCs were gathered. RTs were unaffected by the target item's status as a word or nonword. but they were affected by the internal phonetic structure of the target-bearing item. Vowel duration correlated highly (0.627) with RTs. Experiment V examined previous work purporting to demonstrate that semantic predictability affects how the speech code is processed, in particular that semantic predictability leads to responses based upon a postlexical code. That study found "predictability" effects when words occurred in isolation; further, it found that vowel duration and other phonetic factors can account parsimoniously for the existing results. These factors also account for the apparent nonword superiority effects observed earlier. Implications of the present work for theoretical models that stress the interaction between semantic context and speech processing are discussed, as are implications for use of the phoneme monitoring task.