An experiment was designed to test the hypothesis that abstract materials increase accuracy in solving categorical syllogisms. In an attempt to encourage subjects to reason their way through the problems rather than to make judgments about the truth or desirability of the proffered conclusions, the premises were composed of familiar words in…

The poetry unit presented in this paper is designed to teach high school students how to write poetry through personal observation, journal writing, and small group discussion. Using the unit, students progress through the stages of writing according to the following steps: observing a familiar person and noting words and phrases about that…

Based on the assumption that the content and symbolism of nursery rhymes reflect the particular needs of those who respond to them, this paper analyzes Mother Goose rhymes in relation to the psychological stages of child development. Each basic need of the child, as defined in Bruno Bettelheim's "The Uses of Enchantment," is applied to…

Cultural and dialect differences affect the writing style of black college students in several different ways. Some stylistic features, such as hypercorrection that involves confused word choice, grammatical deviation, or incorrect word order, are undesirable in spite of the fact that they indicate a knowledge of the formality of writing and a…

The effects of making ratings of idea importance, saliency, or textual imagery on story recall was investigated with 180 students (second and sixth grade normal students and mildly mentally retarded adolescents). Ss in eighteen groups attempted to recall a story presented auditorially and in print either before rating on a textual variable…

This study of 96 high school biology students investigates the effectiveness of visual instruction composed of simple line drawings and printed words as compared to printed-words-only instruction, visual tests, and the interaction between visual or non-visual mode of instruction and mode of testing. The subjects were randomly assigned to be given…

A study was conducted to investigate the long term transfer effect of metaphoric allusion used to clarify unfamiliar subject matter. Forty-nine high school students were given unfamiliar prose materials variously augmented by metaphoric allusion. The subjects' immediate performance on a transfer task was compared to their performance on an…

The three dominant views of metaphor emphasize comparison anomaly or dissimilarity, and a somewhat vaguer notion that combines aspects of the first two, called conceptual interaction. In all three views, a central consideration as to the aptness of the metaphor is the similarity of the objects linked by the metaphor (tenor and vehicle). The exact…

Research on the interaction of keyword treatment with materials or student characteristics in learning foreign languages was reviewed. Most of the studies implied that foreign language vocabulary learning was related to verbal, not visual-spatial ability or elaboration, conditions, and that student-generated keywords were more effective than…

The precision and poetic logic of the language used by Anton Chekhov in his plays, particularly "The Sea Gull," can be explored through an analysis of his use of dialogue, characterization, and imagery. Measuring the nature of a relationship, rather than providing a direct literal interchange, the dialogue is both social, when individual…

This paper describes an experiment which investigated the development of recall skills in 120 Caucasian, middle class children in the second, fourth, and sixth grades. Within each age group, four experimental groups were formed in which subjects were asked to remember and recall 16 nouns by: (1) forming mental representations of each word…

Second- and fourth-grade children learned two 25-item, paired-associate mixed lists under three experimental conditions: instructed imagery, imposed imagery, and control. Four specific transfer paradigms and a reference paradigm were represented in the lists. The specific transfer paradigms were constructed such that a first list stimulus term (a…

One of a series of works aimed at presenting contemporary critical opinion on major authors, this collection includes essays by Rene Girard, Robert Vigneron, Henri Peyre, Jacques Riviere, Albert Thibaudet, Walter A. Strauss, Germaine Bree, Georges Cattaui, Elliott Coleman, Leo Spitzer, Richard Macksey, Robert Champigny, Charles Du Bos, Ramon…

One of a series of works aimed at presenting contemporary critical opinion on major authors, this collection includes essays by Walter Jackson Bate, T. S. Eliot, Douglas Bush, Richard H. Fogle, Jack Stillinger, Harold Bloom, David Perkins, Earl Wasserman, and D. G. James--all dealing with the biography and literary work of John Keats. Designed for…

Seven studies were conducted to investigate the interactions between imagery-ability and experimental treatments that parallel instructional procedures. The general orientation of the studies was to extend the concepts of imaginal and verbal coding systems to include individual differences in symbolic habits. Thus all the studies took into account…