The present study employed a concept comparison method to investigate the memory representation of concept interrelationships produced by reading an O. Henry short story. Readers rated all pairings of characters and locations from the story on the basis of how closely the text elements were interpreted as being connected. The interrelationships among the characters and locations were generated by multidimensional scaling. The scaling solution contained the temporal dimension of the story as well as groupings of characters and locations very similar to the groupings in the story. In the first experiment instructional set was found to affect specific interrelationships among the plot elements rather than the overall pattern. In the second experiment a 21-day retention interval produced an effect on the overall structure of the interrelationships.

This study examines the communicative functions served by the lexical usage of normal and language impaired children whose speech was limited to single-word utterances. The two groups were similar in the frequency with which they produced utterances serving most of the functions. However, naming was more frequent in the normal children's speech, while answering was more frequent in the speech of the language impaired children. The two groups were indistinguishable in terms of the number of different lexical items they used in the service of each of the communicative functions.

Notwithstanding the predictive value of foreign language aptitude measures, the underlying ability or abilities tapped by them and their relationship to measures of intelligence are not well understood. This study provides a partial characterization of the nature of language aptitude through correlations and factor analyses of the Modern Language Aptitude Test (MLAT) and the Primary Mental Abilities Test (PMA). The subjects of the study were 793 English-speaking Canadian public servants at various stages of intensive French language training. The results revealed substantial redundancy among the subtests of the MLAT and PMA batteries and a Kaiser's Little Jiffy factor analysis yielded a one-factor solution at the second-order level. A principal factors solution, however, identified three interpretable second-order factors, characterized respectively as first language verbal knowledge, abstract reasoning ability, and ability to learn new language elements and associations. A unitary third-order factor was also identified, probably approximating Spearman's g. Taken together, the findings of the study are compatible with the conceptualization of language aptitude according to a hierarchical model which subsumes specific abilities of importance in the language classroom under a more encompassing general ability, or general intelligence.

The avoidance of inflectional markers, a kind of “macrodevelopment” in the acquisition of morphology, is described in this analysis of the strategies displayed by a bilingual child simultaneously exposed to Estonian and to English. A whole-word approach was manifested in: the acquisition of postpositions before case endings; the learning of pronominal case and other suppletive or irregular forms before regular markers were used; the borrowing of the analytic English construction with have into Estonian; and the preference for did + verb for the expression of the English past tense. In interpreting these data the factor of bilingualism per se is weighed against the possible existence of a whole-word approach to language in general as a manifestation of a particular cognitive style.