Sheldon Rosenberg

Children's knowledge of the presuppositions of know and other cognitive verbs

This study investigated the development of knowledge about the presuppositions of cognitive verbs that take sentential complements. The verbs included factives, which presuppose the truth of their complements, and nonfactives, which carry no such presupposition. Three tasks assessed childrens ability to ( a ) assign truth values to complements according to the presuppositions of the main verbs; ( b ) select verbs to describe peoples mental states; and ( c ) state the presuppositions of the verbs in definitions. The results indicated that the presuppositions of the factives know, forget , and remember and the nonfactive think are not learned until age 4. Believe , which has factive and nonfactive properties, is mastered after age 7. The childrens performance differed across tasks due to variations in processing requirements.

Effects of a high information-processing load on the writing process and the story written

The purpose of this study was to test how information-processing load affects the writing process (through thinking-aloud reports) and the story written. Information-processing load was increased by having subjects write to an ending sentence with more content constraints. Secondary reaction times were synchronized with thinking-aloud statements to yield a measure of cognitive effort for the components of the writing process and for the overall task. A high information-processing load led to lower rated story coherence, but not to lower rated quality. A high load did not increase overall cognitive effort, but changed the distribution of processing time, with more reviewing earlier. Results suggest that a high information-processing load altered the distribution of writing processes, which resulted in lower story coherence.

Semantic integration and sentence perception

A mixed list of semantically well-integrated (SWI) and semantically poorly integrated (SPI) sentences (constructed from associative sentence norms) was presented for shadowing to one group of Ss under quiet and to another group under noise (-5 db signal-to-noise ratio). The SWI and SPI sentences were balanced for length, number, and stress of syllables, number and type of phones, noun animateness, and word frequency. An incidental-recall task followed one trial of shadowing. As anticipated, shadowing under quiet was virtually perfect for both SWI and SPI sentences, noise reduced shadowing overall and SWI sentences were shadowed better than SPI sentences under noise. Incidental learning of SWl material was enhanced by noise, and noise produced a difference in incidental learning in favor of SWI material. An assumption underlying the present research is that the meaning of a word is represented by (among other things) the linguistic contexts that are part of its dictionary definition and the linguistic contexts that are correlates of the experiences (linguistic and nonlinguistic) commonly associated with the word. Such contexts are referred to here as a words contextual features. Thus, on this view the predicates in the sentences, The doctor

Semantic factors in intentional and incidental Sentence recall

Independent groups were exposed to normal or anomalous sentences under an incidental-nonsemantic (letter estimation), incidental-semantic (familiarity rating), or intentional-only orientation. Written recall followed one presentation of the sentences in each group. None of the differences between intentional and incidental-semantic Ss was significant, and semantic coding facilitated recall performance for both normal and anomalous sentences but to a greater extent for normal sentences.