Bransford and Franks 1971

Bransford, John D., and Jeffery J. Franks. 1971. "The abstraction of linguistic ideas." The European Journal of Cognitive Psychology.

Demonstrates the phenomenon of "idea acquisition and retention" experimentally and contrasts with an "individual sentence memory" point of view. Indicates that during acquisition phase of experiments, Ss [subjects] spontaneously integrate information.

Expresses a number of nonconsecutively experienced (but semantically related) sentences into holistic, semantic ideas where they encompass more information than any acquisition sentence. Ss made subsequent attempts to recognize exact sentences heard during acquisition that are a function of the complete ideas. Ss are most confident of recognizing sentences that express all semantic relations characteristic of a complete idea.

Such sentences express more information than was communicated by any single sentence on the acquisition list. Ss become less confident of hearing particular sentences as a "function of the degree to which a sentence fails to exhaust all the semantic relations characteristic of a complete idea" (abstract).

• Bibliography module: Bransford and Franks 1971
• In overview module: Bibliography (Literacy): B
• In modular book: Bibliography (Literacy), by Doris Gallemore, Trudi C. Hunt, Jeanne Swanson, and Stephen L. Walter
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This page is an extract from the LinguaLinks Library, Version 4.0, published on CD-ROM by SIL International, 1999. [Ordering information.]

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