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Develops an experimental technique for investigating the effect of certain linguistic and psychological phenomena on language behavior. Latency between semantically congruent, ambiguous and vague sentences; Linguists' reliance on formal observation and introspective analyses.

This article focuses on the measurement of grammatical constraints. By means of the coefficient of constraint (D) it is possible to measure the constraint exercised by one grammatical type on another, calculating the redundancy of the nth grammatical type when only the first of the chain is known. Mathematical communication theory has been used to calculate the information transmitted by sequences of n letters. These measures of linguistic constraint are equally adjustable to the measurement of grammatical constraint: that is, the cohesion of words. One of the aspects of this cohesion is the impact of one linguistic type on another in the sentence.

The article studies the incidental learning of accessible names and definitions. An experiment was conducted to test and improve three hypotheses concerning the effects of exposing adults to varying combinations of names, definitions, and referents when the motivation to learn was at a minimum and when instructions could be easily executed. The results indicate that denotative definitions could be accurately remembered or utilized under most conditions. Responding with a connotative definition to a name was the least efficient method of learning but only in the absence of a denotative definition.

This article focuses on communication theory, linguistics, and psycholinguistics. Communication is defined as a word that crops up with increasing frequency in educational literature. Although it could hardly be said that linguistics and psycholinguistics are merely riding the coat tails of communication theory, these fields also have received greater attention in the last few years. In order to apply the mathematics of information theory in any useful way, simple communication channels must be adopted. Interest in communication theory has led to a proliferation of models of the communication situation. References to modern structural linguistics were elaborated by the authors.

The article explores the relationship of thought, speech and language to the development of cognitive formations. Oral language implies a linguistic or psycholinguistic concern for the code upon which speech is based. Oral communication suggests an interest in the social function of speech. Oral language and communication theorists consider speech as simply a means of transmitting language while the cognitive development viewpoint considers children's speech as an integrator of thought and language. Cognitive learning usually implies higher-order learning rather than the simple combination of stimulus, response and reinforcement.

Linguistic communications frequently do not contain "explicit" references to the communicator's affective, evaluative, and/or preferential attitude(s) toward the objects, events, or people about which he communicates. Furthermore, even when such attitudes are explicitly communicated in the linguistic portion of a communication, inconsistent cues from other portions (e.g., tone or gestures) may render the overall communication of the attitude ambiguous. The article deals with the problems of inferring a communicator's attitudes from his linguistic communications in a way which independently supplements the inference of attitudes from the explicit linguistic message. The approach here is similar to G.F. Mahl's in that linguistic data are the only source of inferences. Unlike Mahl's approach, the attitudes being inferred here are the communicator's positive (or negative) affective, evaluative, and/or preferential attitude(s). The inference of such communicator attitudes is based on the analysis of the following kinds of phenomena. A communicator, in talking or writing about an object, may express his relationship to the object in a variety of ways which are ostensibly equivalent in as far as affective, evaluative, and/or preferential communicator attitude(s) are concerned.

The article reports on the mediation process and language. Two general classes of problems arise on the study concerning mediation and language. These problems are language as the mediating behavior and nonlinguistic mediating responses as explicators of the meaning of lexical terms. Language is also described as having a special importance to mediation as it furnishes a label or a response, which could be elicited by diverse members of the stimulus class. The area of linguistic structure and its relation to mediation theory is also discussed and presented.

This article discusses the distinction between the two kinds of knowledge and some of the consequences of their interactions specifically as regards phonetics. One which is tacit, is personal and non-verbal, the other, which is explicit, is manifested as linguistic competence. Two interactions are possible between tacit, non-verbal knowledge and explicit, linguistic competence. It is not identical with the ability to encode such information into explicit, linguistic form. The other possible interaction between personal, non-verbal knowledge and explicit, linguistic competence is much more common and far more insidious.

The article presents information about general principals and results associated with syntactic analysis of linguistic texts.