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Eighteen young (almost 16 years of age) and 18 old(average age 70) subjects were assigned to either the control or one of two experimental groups on the basis of their age, sex, vocabulary, and need for achievement scores. All participated in a test session and two experimental sessions. Results indicate that: (1) Items that have been often experienced and are repeatedly represented in the storage system of a subject are recognized faster than items that have been experienced less often. (2) For subjects with large accumulated repertoires (old subjects), the effects of experience with new items of varying frequencies will be relatively less marked than for subjects with smaller repertoires (young subjects). Keeping all other factors constant, their recognition thresholds for such new items are higher than for young subjects. (3) There seem to be age differences in long term need states as measured by the need for achievement test. Old subjects seem to rearrange items at a lower speed than young subjects and consequently have lower achievement test scores. (4) Need-arousing instructions hinder the performance of old subjects, but improve the performance of young ones. Because of their large storage, old subjects seem to become confused rather than being supported by this influence. The authors also discuss the need for further research and the implications of such research. (DO)

The role of perceptual discrimination in the development of the ability to selectively process information was investigated. Using an incidental learning paradigm, the discriminability between relevant and irrelevant stimuli was experimentally varied in two ways: (1) contiguity versus non-contiguity in spatial arrangements and (2) alternating versus non-alternating arrangements. The subjects were 80 children in each of the fourth, sixth, and eighth grades. It was concluded that the development change responsible for selective information processing did not involve improved visual discrimination. A post-test questionnaire revealed that older subjects were characterized by more efficient encoding and rehearsal strategies which were postulated as the basis for the older subjects' relatively better ability to selectively process information. This paper comprises a report in "Development of Language Functions, A Research Program-Project (Study C: Development of Selective Attention Abilities)." (Author/DO)

Earlier studies found that recall scores of information central to the task increased with age while incidental information recall scores remained constant. This study repeated the earlier ones modifying procedures of instructions, testing, and schedule of recall. Also, it tested the effect of labeling pictorial stimuli. The sample of 253 children were to learn to discriminate either content or position of presented pictures as central information. The sample was divided by three age groups, 7 to 9, 10 to 11, and 12 to 14. These groups were further subdivided into four groups. The first group received more ambiguous directions than did the other groups. The second group was tested on a balanced schedule of recall. The third group was shown names of animals, while the fourth group was shown numbers designating positions of pictures. The results showed that (1) as before, content recall scores increase with age, (2) more ambiguous directions led to less selectivity at all ages, (3) a balanced schedule of recall was effective at an older age, (4) labeling depresses incidental information scores at all ages, and (5) name labeling is more effective than numerical labeling, but not at a significant level. A bibliography and tables are included. (JS)

The effect of verbal labeling in a serial position short term memory task was investigated. Forty female college students were given 16 trials each. Eight trials involved only central items which had to be recalled. The other eight trials involved both central and incidental items. Half of the subjects verbalized the names of the central items as they were presented. Verbalization was found to decrease short term memory performance. There was no effect of one versus two stimuli per card. The authors feel that these results supplement the past research in this area and support a view that with age the use of rehearsal strategies becomes increasingly dominant. Consequently, labeling inhibits the use of more efficient processing. This paper comprises a report in "Development of Language Functions, a Research Program-Project (Study M: Development of Selective Attention Abilities)." (DO)

The associative behavior of 24 male chronic schizophrenics and 24 normal control subjects (male) equated for age and educational level was investigated. Free and restricted associations were obtained to analyze the organizational aspects of associative behavior as well as the number of unique or common responses per task, response repetitions under different task instructions, and agreement in responses among both groups of subjects. The associations of schizophrenics were more variable than those of normal subjects especially on tasks which restricted most the choice of responses. Agreement in responding between normal and schizophrenic subjects was markedly lower when compared with that between high and low creative subjects or with one-year test-retest data of a heterogeneous group. Repetition of responses given to the same stimuli under different instructions was markedly higher for schizophrenics, and thus, the degree of task/response differentiation was reduced. The restricted associations overlapped with free associations more markedly for schizophrenics, but the general structure of a conceptual semantic space was about the same for both groups. The authors feel that when explicit constraint in tasks of verbal associations in high, schizophrenics (more than normals) impose a low degree of implicit constraint upon their verbal behavior; when the external constraint is low, they increase implicit constraing. (Author/DO)

The applicability of Piaget's cognitive processes of assimilation and accommodation to the learning of verbal nonsense syllables (ten low association value consonant-vowel-consonant trigrams) was tested experimentally. Twenty-two undergraduates (ten female and 12 male) at the University of Michigan served as subjects. It was hypothesized that learning rate should be a function of the amount of cognitive adjustment the subject had to make to the stimulus material measured by changes in semantic differential ratings of the stimuli before and after they were learned. Results showed two groups of fast learners, one of which made significantly less changes than the slow learners, and one significantly more. Systematic directional shift on the evaluative, potency, and activity dimensions of the semantic differential were also found. The author feels that these findings lend considerable support for the applicability of Piaget's processes of assimilation and accommodation to the learning process and that identification and investigation of internal processes of this type will be necessary before the learning function of the human organism is understood. This paper comprises a report in "Development of Language Functions, A Research Program-Project." (DO)

Eighty nursery school children were randomly divided into four groups of 20 and given a serial short-term memory task in which difficult-to-label stimuli were used. Three experimental groups were provided with labels for the stimuli. Of these, one group overtly pronounced the labels and rehearsed them during the task, one group merely pronounced the labels overtly, and one group was instructed to say the labels covertly. A control group received no labels for the stimuli. Rehearsal of the labels was found to facilitate recall performance on early serial items, and overt labeling facilitated recall on the last serial item. Covert labeling did not facilitate recall. The results supported the hypothesis that qualitatively different processing strategies determine primacy and recency effects. Current theories of the role of verbalizing in children's memory performance are discussed. (Author/MS)

A. R. Luria, in his conception of the verbal control of behavior, regards four fundamental and distinctive functional attributes of the human speech system as making up a signaling system that humans alone possess: (1) the nominative role of language, (2) the generalizing or semantic role, (3) the communicative role, and (4) the role of regulating, directing, or controlling sequential behavior. Prior to the time a child learns to speak, his signaling system is nonverbal and is generated by the physical attributes of the surrounding environment. Luria contends that as the individual matures, the two signaling systems, verbal and nonverbal, work more closely together. He states that the verbal system, both in its communicative and regulative aspects, makes possible novel and flexible behavior without the tedious conditioning necessary for animal learning. Luria views speech as being formed through a series of transformations (substages) rather than through quantitative increases in such things as vocabulary and grammatical rules. In order to test Luria's theory, an experiment involving discrimination was administered to 32 children between the ages of 41 and 78 months. The results generally supported the hypotheses. (WD)

This dissertation examines the thesis that it is the human language system which largely makes possible the human capacity for modifiability of responses called "intelligent" and "adaptive" modes of interaction with the environment. Chapter titles are (1) A Process View of Human Behavior, (2) Aspects of the Multi-Dimensional Nature of Cognitive Processes in the Very Young Child, (3) Linguistic Theory as a Model of Language Perception and Learning, (4) The Structure of Linguistically Initiated Behavioral Acts, (5) The Relationship of the Comprehension of Sentences to Their Complexity, (6) An Experimental Study of Linguistic and Other Psychological Factors in the R-EGULATION OF Behavior in Very Young Children, and (7) Discussion of Results. The author concludes that perceptual or attentional processes which involve expressions of orienting activity should be studied in regard to ontogenetic development and its relationship to the verbal system of preschool children. (MS)

Tasks involving several areas of cognitive functioning were given to 10 psychotic children and 30 normal children. Comparisons of performance were made between the two groups and also within the psychotic group. The dimension for differentiation was the psychotic children's varying degree of language facility. The psychotic children were classified into three language facility groups: functional, semifunctional, and nonfunctional. The cognitive abilities tested for were short term memory, discrimination, generalization, transposition, and discrimination reversal. They were chosen because they were significantly language-related or language-mediated. The results of performance on the cognitive functioning tasks showed that (1) the normal children performed consistently better than the psychotic children, (2) the language facility groups of the psychotic children differentiated their performance on the memory task involving a verbal cue, with the functional group performing best, and (3) certain trends in the data suggest a relationship between language functioning and cognitive performance on the tasks investigated. (WD)

This paper is a critical comment and reaction to a 1965 article by G. A. Miller entitled "Some Preliminaries to Psycholinguistics." The subject matter is verbal control of behavior. Seven specific aspects of the Miller address are discussed. (WD)

The verbal behavior of three children was sampled. The samples were analyzed to obtain a picture of three stages of the children's language development, specifically the interrogative structures. Each stage was about 4- or 5-months long, starting at the 18th to 28th month, depending upon the child's level of linguistic ability. The interrogative structures of primary interest were (1) intonation patterns, (2) auxiliary inversion, (3) negation, (4) WH word (what, who, why, etc.) placement, and (5) tag questions. At stage one, inflections, auxiliaries, articles, and most pronouns were absent. The child used intonation to mark a question. There were no yes-or-no questions and only a few WH questions. There were no tag questions. The child at this stage did not appear to understand the interrogatory structure when he heard it. At stage two, articles, pronouns, and negative preverb forms appeared. Auxiliaries were still not present, nor were tag questions. Stage three included the emergence of the use of auxiliaries, auxiliary inversion, and the do transformation. Inversion and transformation were found in yes-or-no questions but were absent in WH questions. Tag questions were still absent, but the children understood and responded well to questions. An appendix of sample questions obtained from the subjects at each stage is included. (WD)

Research on learning and conditioning suggests that verbal response modification does not occur in the absence of the subject's ability to define verbally (1) the response-reinforcement relationships and (2) his intention to change his behavior in the direction of reinforcement. This seems to be true for operant conditioning of verbal behavior, operant conditioning of skeletal nonverbal responses, and perceptual learning of correlated cues. Research in the area of conditioning of autonomic responses shows consistently that subjects who are aware of the stimulus-negative reinforcement condition manifest greater autonomic response conditioning than subjects who are not aware of the experimental conditions. (WD)

A contribution to the debate on innate factors in children's language acquisition is rendered by cross-linguistic comparisons of children's languages. Russian, for example, is sufficiently different from English to serve as a useful contrast. Early syntactic development is very much the same in both languages. A small class of "pivot words" and a larger open class of words are used first. Word order is quite inflexible at each of the early stages of syntactic development. Two-word sentences appear at about 1:8 (1 year, 8 months); three- or four-word sentences appear at about 1:10. Morphological markers enter with the three- and four-word sentences. The learning of morphology goes on longer than the learning of syntactic patterns. A major Russian work on language development contends that the Russian child does not master his morphology until several years beyond the age at which the American child completes his primary grammatical learning. This factor suggests that it may be more difficult to learn to speak one language natively than another, although in both, basic learning is accomplished rapidly. (WD)

Traditional research methods of recording infant verbal behavior, namely, descriptions by a single observer transcribing the utterances of a single infant in a naturalistic setting, have been inadequate to provide data necessary for modern linguistic analyses. The Center for Research on Language and Language Behavior has undertaken to correct this inadequacy. The Center collected permanent, complete, and continuous records of all vocalizations of two infants during their first five months of life. This data was then processed by new electro-acoustic techniques. In processing one hundred and eight 95-second vocal behavior samples, the computer determined (1) the number of utterances, (2) the duration of each utterance, and (3) the mean and standard deviation of the fundamental frequency and amplitude of each utterance. Further statistical analyses are now in progress. (WD)

A research project was aimed at measuring the relationship between infant vocalizations and linguistic development and determining the feasibility of using infant vocalizations as a predictor of later psychological and intellectual status. However, a method was needed to analyze the vocalizations of infants. This report describes a method used to analyze the vocal behavior of infants in their prelinguistic stage, from birth to 4 months. The method was based on the "distinctive features" concept. Eight distinctive features of infant vocalization were coded by observers. This data yielded information on the quality and frequency of infant vocal behavior and provided a measure of individual differences between prelinguistic infants. Data have been collected on forty 3-day-old infants. This eight-feature coding scheme has proven to be reliable. (WD)

This document includes 10 articles dealing with five specific areas of language development. Two articles and a commentary cover each area. Resumes of the articles have been assigned the following numbers: memory functions (PS 001 487 and PS 001 488), associations and verbal habits (PS 001 489 and PS 001 490), language perception and discrimination (PS 001 491 and PS 001 492), verbal structures (PS 001 493 and PS 001 494), and verbal control PS 001 495 and PS 001 496). (WD)

This paper is concerned with memory functions in sequentially structured behavior. Twenty-five 4- and 5-year-old preschool children participated in a prediction experiment in which a stack of cards (each card alternately having a patch of red or green tape on it) was displayed to the child. The child was presented with a card and asked to predict the color on the next card. Two interval lengths, a long and a short, were used between presentation and prediction. The subject's performance, it was thought, was affected by (1) memory of each trial, (2) effects of the previous response, (3) lagging of attention, (4) guessing, and (5) the variation in interval length. The results from 100 trials indicated that the probability of an error, given a correct response on the previous trial, is greater following the long interval than following the short. It was also found that the probability of an error, given a correct response, is less than or equal to both the probability of a correct response, given an error, and the probability of an error, given an error. The theoretical basis of this task is being used to develop a recall task similar in form to the prediction task. (WD)

In a 1964 investigation of the effects of age and memory on problem solving, using subjects from age three to age nineteen, it was found that the youngest and oldest subjects performed a three-choice probabilistic task significantly different from the "middle-age" children (7 to 9 years old). The three-choice task was an apparatus with a signal light, three buttons, and a container into which marbles were dispensed for "correct" responses. Only one button was set up to release a marble, and even it was on a partial reinforcement schedule. The younger and older subjects tended to maximize their choice of the "pay-off" button. The middle-age children tended to respond in simple patterns regardless of the fact that such patterns did not increase the pay-off. It was thought that this result interfered with their memory in regard to which button was paying off. A later study, in which a memory aid was used for half of the subjects, was conducted. It was found that the younger and older subjects performed about the same as before, regardless of the existence of the memory aid. The 7- and 9-year-olds who used the aid performed significantly better than those who did not. A third study, similar to the previous studies except that four different reinforcement schedules were used, indicated that responses become more complex with age. (WD)

THIS RESEARCH STUDY WAS BASED ON THE ASSUMPTION THAT THE TECHNIQUE OF PSYCHOLINGUISTIC EXPERIMENTATION, AS WELL AS FORMAL ANALYSIS, CAN BE APPLIED TO DISCOVER SOME VARIABLES WHICH ALLOW THE HUMAN TO RESOLVE AMBIGUOUS SENTENCES. THE PROBLEM OF AMBIGUITY WAS CONFINED TO SITUATIONS IN WHICH A KEY PRONOUN IN A SENTENCE HAS MORE THAN ONE POSSIBLE ANTECEDENT. THE OBJECTIVE WAS TO DISCOVER SOME PARAMETERS THAT CONTROL THE ABILITY TO RESOLVE AMBIGUOUS PRONOMINAL REFERENCE IN DIFFERENT AGE GROUPS. THE EXPERIMENT INVOLVED A SET OF 176 SENTENCES, EACH OF WHICH CONTAINED PRONOUNS WITH AMBIGUOUS ANTECEDENTS. THE EXPERIMENTAL SUBJECTS--FIFTH, SEVENTH, AND EIGHTH GRADE CHILDREN, AND COLLEGE SOPHOMORES--JUDGED THE MOST APPROPRIATE REFERENT IN EACH SENTENCE. RESULTS FROM THE SOPHOMORE GROUP CONCLUSIVELY DEMONSTRATED THAT SUBJECTS COULD RESOLVE AN AMBIGUITY IN A SENTENCE BY REDUCING THE MEANING OF A KEY WORD FROM TWO TO ONE. EIGHTH GRADE SUBJECTS DEMONSTRATED THEY COULD LARGELY RESOLVE THE PRONOMINAL REFERENT WHEN REAL VERBS WERE USED (AS OPPOSED TO NONSENSE VERBS). RESULTS FROM THE SEVENTH GRADE SUBJECTS SHOWED A FURTHER DEGENERATION WITH RESPECT TO THE RESPONSES OF THE EIGHTH GRADERS. IN GENERAL THE FIFTH GRADE SUBJECTS WERE NOT ABLE TO RESOLVE THE PRONOMINAL AMBIGUITIES. THIS REPORT INCLUDES AN EXTENSIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY, THE TEST SENTENCES, RESPONSE MATRICES, AND AN "IDEAL GROUP" CHART. (AM)

Eight sentences with high associative connections between their major elements (hi-m sentences) were generated from the Michigan Restricted Association Norms (Riegel, 1965a, b). Eight additional sentences with no or low association connections (lo-m sentences) were derived from the hi-m sentences by a scrambling procedure. All sentences were of the form subject-verb-object or subject-verb-location, and were presented to eight male and eight female undergraduates in a learning task. Hi-m sentences were recalled significantly more often than lo-m sentences. The interaction, but not the differences, between the first and second trials were significant. There was an increase in the recall scores from trial to trial for the hi-m sentences but a decrease for the lo-m sentences. Generally, the results confirmed that it is possible to construct sentences with predictable recall scores on the basis of restricted and free association norms. This paper comprises a report in "Development of Language Functions, A Research Program-Project (Study B: Developmental Studies in Semantics)." (Author/DO)

Free-association norms for 200 words were obtained in 1964 from the responses of 500 subjects in each of grades four through eight, 10, and 12 and from 1,000 college students. An analysis of this normative data revealed that (1) the frequency of occurrence of the most popular associative responses to stimulus words increases with the age of the subject, (2) the number of different responses to a word decreases with the age of the subject, (3) the response words themselves undergo about a 50 percent change from the fourth grade to college, (4) contrast or opposite responses increase with age, and (5) paradigmatic responses also increase with the age of the subject. Thus, word-association characteristics vary importantly between children and adults. The influence of the associative strength of words on different verbal learning tasks has been investigated. Such an influence has been demonstrated for paired-associate learning, clustering in free recall, associative generalization, and mediated generalization. Normative word association data have also been collected for children in grades one through four. Analysis of these data shows the same trends as observed in the norms discussed for the larger population. (WD)

This paper discusses the theory and presents examples of free-association norms. Examples from several categories of free-association data are given. Their use in experiments on cultural characteristics of the associative structures of words are also explained. A graph of the relationship between primary and secondary associations and tables of associations and probability hierarchies are included. These tables are explained in the text of the paper and illustrated in the appendix. A bibliography is also included. (WD)