Development of natural language concepts

JOURNAL

OF EXPERIMENTAL

CHILD

PSYCHOLOGY

25, 447-458 (1978)

Development of Natural Language Concepts IV. The Relationship

between

Semantic ELI

Center

for

the Study

of Cognitive

Organization

and Learning

SALTZ Processes,

Wayne

State

University

AND ALEKSANDRA

DUNIN-MARKIEWICZ

Marygrove

College

In Experiment 1, 30 subjects at each of three age levels were shown pictures of unfamiliar “animals”. They were told two semantic attributes for each animal (e.g., kind and strong) and were asked to learn these sets so that, when shown a picture, the appropriate attributes could be recalled. The results indicated that the dimensional structure of the attributes had a strong effect on new learning for young children. Incongruent pairs of attributes (e.g., kind and ug1.v) were difficult to learn compared to congruent (e.g., kind and beautiful) or unrelated (e.g., kind and tall) sets. These results indicate: (a) Attribute structure is a factor in new learning; (b) 6-year-olds tend to organize the verbal labels for attributes into bipolar dimensions, rather than into independent clusters of attributes. The latter findings require reexamination of the meaning of previous word-association data which had been interpreted as indicating that 6-year-olds tend not to organize meanings bipolarly. Experiment 2 showed that the disruptive effects of incongruence on new learning disappears by college age.

The present series of studies is concerned with the manner children attempt to develop verbal schema for dealing with the world of persons and things, and with the attributes of these entities. To a great extent, nouns are used to refer to concrete Adjectives, verbs, and adverbs are used to refer to the attributes entities. A number of studies in recent years have investigated the

in which concrete concrete entities. of these semantic

The present study was supported by National Science Foundation grant No. GB 22665 to the senior author. The authors wish to express their appreciation to the staff and students of St. Cunegunda Catholic School in Detroit, for their cooperation. Also, the authors acknowledge their gratitude to Dr. Melissa Bowerman who read early versions of the manuscript and whose thoughtful and detailed comments were invaluable in helping clarify and focus the paper. Requests for reprints should be addressed to Dr. Eli Saltz, Center for the Study of Cognitive Processes, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI 48202. 447

0022~0965/78/0253-0447$02.00/O Copyright 0 1978 by Academic Press. Inc. All rights of reproduction m any form reserved.

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structure of attributes by examining the intercorrelations between such verbal attribute labels. By studying the ways attribute labels are used, it was hoped that we could discover the different types of judgements that people are capable of making concerning concrete entities and concepts (e.g., a person may be kind or cruel, big or smrzfl). Examination of the patterns of intercorrelations has indicated which attribute-labels are used in similar ways, and which are independent of each other. Some studies have described the systematic changes in attribute structure that occur with age. However, little is known about the psychological implications of these attribute structures for the manner in which children learn or think. The primary focus of the present experiments is on the effects of attribute structure on learning when children attempt to learn that different patterns of attributes are appropriate to different concrete entities. In addition, however, our data also have implications for certain issues concerning semantic organization, per se, namely: Do young children organize attribute words (or their meanings) in independent, nondimensional clusters, or do they organize these meanings in terms of the bipolar dimensions that characterize adult organization? The evidence suggests that attributes are highly intercorrelated for young children, and that this tendency reduces with age. In a pioneering study in this area, Ervin and Foster (1960) examined the reactions of 6- and 12-year olds to attributes from Osgood’s evaluative factor (viz., good-bad, pretty-ugly, clean-dirty, happy-sad). For example, they showed children pictures of two faces, one happy and the other sad, and asked “Is one clean and the other dirty, or are they both the same?” In general, the younger children responded as though the attributes good, pretty, and happy were very likely to co-occur: clear2 was somewhat less strongly related to other attributes. By 12 years of age these correlations dropped significantly. While Ervin and Foster (1960) had restricted their interest to the relationship between attributes within the factors already identified by Osgood in his studies of adult semantic structure, Saltz, DuninMarkiewicz, and Rourke (1975) raised the more general question of whether semantic structure, per se, changes with age. A multidimensional scaling study indicated that at 6 years of age, the entire semantic structure was, to agreat extent, collapsed into a single general-evaluative dimension. Thus anything kind was also considered big, beautiful, .fust, and smart. With age, the number of relatively independent dimensions increased so that college students produced a semantic structure with five dimensions; while the general-evaluative dimension found in the 6-year-olds persisted even in our college sample, its strength decreased systematically with age. The first issue to be considered in the present study is the relationship between new learning and the general-evaluative dimension found in the attribute structure of subjects over a relatively wide range of ages. Let us

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consider the implications of this dimension. Logically, there is no reason why a person could not be simultaneously kind and ugly. Yet, in an attribute structure in which kind-cruel and beaufiful-ugly are highly intercorrelated, a concept instance that was kind yet ugly would be affectively incongruent. The assumption is often made that learning will be easier if the attributes ascribed to a concept are congruent than if they are incongruent. Surprisingly, there is meager experimental evidence on this issue. Evidence for a sensitivity to evaluative incongruence in young children is found in studies by Saltz and Hamilton (1968) and Saltz and Medow (1971). These studies found marked disruption of natural language concepts. For example, there was a strong tendency for both 5- and 8-year-olds to deny that a man can remain a father if he becomes a drunkard. These children rated father as good and drunkard as bad. Therefore, it appears that they had difficulty with the concept of a father who had bad attributes. It should be noted that these disruptive tendencies were symmetrical; the data suggested that the children had an equal amount of difficulty accepting the notion that a man could remain a drunkard if he became a father. On the other hand, the 8-year-olds had no difficulty when the newly assigned attributes were evaluatively congruent with those of the original concept (e.g., a father who becomes a doctor can still be a father, according to these children, who rated both father and doctor as goocf). If attribute incongruity leads to the disruption of a concept that had been already learned, it might also lead to an increase in the difficulty of learning new concepts. Heider’s (1958) balance theory has produced a line of research concerned with learning in which some of the issues appear to parallel those of the present paper. Zajonc and Burnstein (1965a, 1965b), working within Heider’s theory, have suggested that people expect to find cognitively congruent relations between aspects of the environment; such expectations should lead to faster learning of cognitive structures which are congruent than those which are incongruent. For example, a state of cognitive incongruence exists if Al and Art like each other, but Art favors integration while Al opposes it. Under such circumstances, Zajonc and Burnstein hypothesized that subjects would have difficulty learning that Al likes Art. The Zajonc and Burnstein experiments tended to confirm the Heiderian hypotheses, but only when the issue around which the incongruence centered was an important one. However, other studies working within this framework failed to find a difference between the learning of congruent and incongruent structures (e.g., Rubin & Zajonc, 1969; Cottrell, Ingraham, & Menfort, 1970). The experiments to be reported in the present paper related new learning to the semantic structure of the general-evaluative dimension found by Saltz et al. (1975). To examine the effect of semantic structure on learning,

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we arbitrarily assigned sets of attributes to artificial “concepts” -fictitious animals. Drawings of the animals were shown to the children, who were told two attributes for each animal, and were asked to remember which characteristics belonged to each picture. Three types of attribute relationships were examined: (a) congruent attributes, in which the two attributes of an animal were from correlated scales, and both were either evaluatively positive or both were negative (e.g., kind and honest, or cruel and dishonest); (b) unrelated attributes, in which the two attributes were from uncorrelated dimensions (e.g., honest and young); (c) incongruent attributes, in which the two attributes were from correlated dimensions, but from opposite poles of these dimensions (e.g., kind and dirty). In evaluating the effect of semantic structure on new learning, the rate of learning for unrelated attributes can serve as a baseline for determining whether any differences in learning between congruent and incongruent combinations are due to incongruence producing a disruption of learning, congruence producing a facilitation of learning, or both. If congruence-incongruence does prove to influence new learning, the specific differences found can have implications for the psychological properties of semantic dimensions at various ages. Most developmental studies of semantic structure, from Ervin and Foster (1960) to Saltz et al. (1975), have followed the lead of Osgood, Suci, and Tannenbaum (1957) and have employed attribute dimensions consisting of bipolar opposite words. Osgood et al. (1957, pp. 25-30) have defended this on the assumption that reactions to the environment are mediated by pairs of reciprocally antagonistic reactions; they suggest that each major dimension of the semantic space, defined by a pair of bipolar words, corresponds to such a pair of antagonistic reactions. On the other hand, there has been some question as to whether the younger children in such studies actually make semantic judgements in bipolar terms. For example, while adults performing on a word association test are very likely to respond to an attribute label by giving its antonym, young children, even by 6 years of age, do so relatively seldom. The position can be taken that the mind of the young child is organized in nondimensional clusters of attributes. This sort of position is suggested by Ervin and Foster’s (1960) hypothesis that the evaluative congruence between attributes like good, happy, and pretty arises because parents and other adults use these attribute labels in very similar contexts (e.g., “What a good girl,” “What a pretty girl,” etc.). Young children could be assumed to cluster these attribute labels which they hear being used in similar situations. Such clustering would not lead the children to organize these clusters as opposite poles of semantic dimensions. Instead, positive and negative clusters would be independent of each other, and not more different from each other than either would be from an unrelated set of attributes. For example, if attributes were organized as nondimensionalized clusters, attributes like kind, ugly, and

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tall would simply belong to three independent clusters since kind and ugly do not systematically occur in the same context (despite the fact that they are at opposite ends of the evaluative dimension for older children); nor do kind and tall, or ugly and tall. If the semantic structure of young children is organized in terms of nondimensional clusters, kind and ugly would be no more incongruent than kind and tall. In short, evaluative incongruence should be no more disruptive of learning than evaluative unrelatedness. Experiment 1 compared the learning of congruent, unrelated, and incongruent attributes over three age levels: 6- and lZyear-olds and college-age subjects. Experiment 2 was similar to Experiment 1 except that it involved only college students, and employed materials at a difficulty level more appropriate to this age. METHOD

Experiment

1

Subjects. Of the 90 subjects in this experiment, 30 were 6-year-olds and 30 were 12-year-olds from a Catholic school in Detroit: 30 were college students enrolled in Introductory Psychology at Wayne State University. Approximately half of each group were male, half female. Materials. The verbal material used in this experiment was selected from Saltz et al. (1975) and consisted of the 15 pairs of attributes which the youngest children most often judged as being related, and the 10 pairs of words which they least often judged as being related. The highly related pairs were: kind -honest, kind -friendly, kind -smart, kind -clean, honest -smart, friendly -careful, friendly -happy, smart -careful, smart clean, smart -brave, careful-clean, beautiful-clean, beautifulhardworking, clean-happy, brave-hardworking. The unrelated pairs were: kind -strong, kind -big, honest -young, smart -young, careful brave, beautiful-young, beautiful-big, young-brave, younghardworking, young-strong. The average correlation between the highly

related pairs was .87 for the &year-olds, .40 for the l2-year-olds, and .36 for the college students. For the unrelated words, the average correlations were .12, .O, and .O, respectively for the three groups. Three pictures of fictitious animals were employed as the concepts to which the attribute-sets were learned. Procedure. Each subject was tested individually. The three pictures were spread on the table and the subject was told that these are fairy-tale animals, each of which possesses two characteristics. One of the animals would then be given a congruent pair of attributes (e.g., kind-honest), the next animal would be allotted two unrelated characteristics (e.g., beautiful-big), and the remaining animal would be assigned two incongruent adjectives (e.g., smart -dirty). The incongruent pairs were created by juxtaposing a negative pole of one dimension with the positive

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pole of another dimension highly correlated with it. No two animals learned by a subject contained attributes from the same dimension. The order in which the words were presented and the picture to which a given pair of attributes would be assigned, as well as the arrangement of the pictures, were completely randomized. A counterbalancing procedure was employed such that half the attributes learned in each condition were affectively positive, and half were affectively negative. This occurred automatically, of course, in the affectively incongruent pairs. For the affectively congruent pairs, in half the cases both attributes were positive (e.g., honest andsmart), in the other half both had a negative dynamic character (e.g., dishonest and silly). The uncorrelated attributes were presented so as to be affectively positive for half the subjects and affectively negative for the other half. The subjects were required to learn the two characteristics of each animal (i.e., three pairs of words) until the criterion of one perfect trial was reached. A study/test procedure was used. First a subject was told the attributes of each of the three animals in turn (at approximately a 2-second rate per animal); then the animals were pointed to, one at a time, and the subject was asked to indicate the characteristics of each (approximately 5 seconds permitted per response). An error was counted if the subject omitted an attribute or gave an incorrect attribute to a stimulus picture. If the subject omitted both attributes, or gave two incorrect attributes, this was scored as two errors. Thus on any trial a subject could make between 0 and 6 errors. Experiment

2

Subjects. The subjects were 80 college students enrolled in Introductory Psychology at Wayne State University. Materials. The words used as attributes were taken from Saltz et al. (1975). For the congruent and incongruent concepts, the words chosen were those that entered into the highest correlations for the college group in the Saltz et al. study. The average correlation for these pairs of dimensions was .55. The average correlation for the unrelated pairs was .O. To a very large extent, the same individual words appeared in all three conditions; however, the pairings were different from condition to condition. For example, the attribute young was part of a congruent set in the pair young -excitable, part of an incongruent set in the pair young -smart, and part of an unrelated set in the pair young -dishonest. (As in Experiment 1, any given attribute dimension was represented only once for any subject.) Similarly, degree of positive versus negative affectively was kept equal among the three conditions. In the incongruent condition, of course, one attribute in each pair was affectively positive, the other negative. In the congruent pairs, both items of each pair were either positive or negative in affect; however, half the pairs were made positive, and half negative, to

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AND LEARNING

control for affectivity. In the unrelated pairs, it was possible to use both of the above techniques; half the pairs were affectively homogeneous (e.g., both positive, like careful-active, or both negative, like careless-lazy); half the pairs were affectively heterogeneous (e.g., careful-lazy). Six pictures of fictitious animals were employed as the concepts to which the attribute sets were learned. Procedure. The procedure was essentially identical to that of Experiment 1 with the following exceptions. Six animals were learned by each subject, instead of three. Of the six, two were consistent, two were inconsistent, and two were unrelated. Of the two unrelated, one was homogeneous, the other heterogeneous. As in Experiment 1, learning was to a criterion of one errorless trial. Scoring was the same as described for Experiment 1 except that, since there were six animals to learn, a subject could make as many as 12 errors on any trial. RESULTS Experiment

1

The results of Experiment 1 indicate that attribute structure, as measured by Saltz et al. (1975), is strongly related to new learning in young children; the effects for adults are less clear. Table 1 summarizes the mean number of errors in learning for the various conditions. At all three ages, the greatest number of errors occurred for conditions involving incongruent attributes. There was relatively little difference in error rates for conditions involving congruent attributes as opposed to those involving unrelated attributes. A 3 x 3 mixed design ANOVA over the data summarized in Table 1 showed that the difference in errors between congruent, incongruent, and unrelated sets ofattributes was highly significant,F(2,174) = 4.82,~ < .Ol. Age of subjects also had a significant effect on learning, F(2,87) = 14.69, TABLE MEAN NUMBER INCONGRUENT,

1

OF ERRORS PER CONCEPT IN THE LEARNING OF CONGRUENT, AND UNRELATED ATTRIBUTES IN EXPERIMENTS 1 AND 2

Attribute

combinations

Congruent

Unrelated

Incongruent

Experiment 1 Age 6 Age 12 College age

5.57 2.30 1.70

5.57 2.67 1.23

7.60 3.13 2.23

Experiment 2 College age

4.27

3.85

4.06

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p < .OOl. The interaction between age and conditions failed to approach significance. Tests of the simple effects showed that the significant difference between congruent, incongruent, and unrelated attributes was due to the fact that the incongruent attributes produced slower learning than the other two types. On the other hand, congruent attributes and unrelated were learned equally rapidly. This can be seen by the following comparisons. For incongruent versus congruent, F(1,87) = 7.78: for incongruent versus unrelated, F( 1,87) = 7.02; in both cases, p < .Ol. However, for congruent versus unrelated, F( 1,87) < 1.OO. It should be noted in Table 1 that the effects of incongruence were largest for the youngest children and decreased with age. However, since the interaction between congruence and age did not approach significance, we can not reject the hypothesis that this decline represents random fluctuation in learning scores. This issue will be dealt with in Experiment 2. Since incongruity had its greatest effect in the 6-year-old group, the data for these children was examined more closely. First, it should be observed that learning was relatively good: only 31% of all responses made were errors. Of these, 86% were omission errors and this percentage was fairly constant across the three experimental conditions. In all conditions, when intrusion errors occurred, their affective value was usually consistent with that of the word that they displaced. For example, in the incongruentattributes condition, 13.4% of the errors were intrusions: this 13.4% broke down into 10.4% in which the intrusions and the displaced attributes had the same affective value, and 3% where they had opposite affective values. In the congruent-attributes condition a very similar set of results was found, with 14.9% of the total errors being intrusions; this broke down to 10.2% in which the intrusion and the displaced attribute were affectively similar, and 4.7% in which they had opposite affective values. Clearly, the significant differences between congruent and incongruent conditions were not the result of a tendency to intrude congruent attributes in place of incongruent. Incongruence appears to have interfered directly with the learning process, leading to an omission of response. Experiment

2

It is clear from Table 1 that the disruptive effect of incongruence on learning, found in the first experiment, is greatest for the younger children, and is quite small in the college sample. The purpose of Experiment 2 was to examine more closely the effects of incongruence on college age subjects, to determine if the effects of incongruence dissipate with age. Experiment 2 differed from Experiment 1 in three important ways. First, the material was made more difficult by requiring subjects to learn two attributes to each of six concepts (while in Experiment 1 only three

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concepts were learned). The highly significant effect of age on learning rate, found in Experiment 1, indicated that materials which were appropriately difficult for the 6-year-olds might have been too easy for the college students. Second, in Experiment 2 the pairing of terms to determine the congruence, incongruence, and unrelatedness conditions was based totally on the norms for college students in the Saltz et al. (1975) study. Third, the use of 80 college subjects in a within-subject design provided for a more sensitive test of an incongruence effect, if one is to be found. RESULTS

Table 1 summarizes the mean number of errors in the various experimental conditions for Experiment 2. The means for the various conditions are very similar. The sets of incongruent attributes did not produce the greatest number of errors. Analysis of variance shows that there are no significant differences among the three means, F(2,158) = 1.42. Thus the results of Experiment 2 indicate that for young adults, incongruent attributes assigned to a concept are not learned more slowly than congruent or unrelated sets, at least under the conditions of the present experiments. DISCUSSION

Several general conclusions emerge from the results of the two experiments reported here. First, for younger children at least, the semantic structure of attribute labels has a clear relationship to the ease with which these labels can be combined and assigned to some concept in new learning. Incongruent attributes are difficult to learn when assigned to the same concept. On the other hand, congruent attributes are no easier to learn than unrelated attributes. The data of Experiment 1 suggest that this pattern may become attenuated with age. Experiment 2 clearly shows that college students no longer exhibit this pattern; the relationship between incongruence and learning has totally disappeared for these older subjects. Why is the learning of young children disrupted by incongruent attributes while college students show no such effect? One possible explanation is suggested by the theory proposed by Saltz (1971). How does the child (or adult) represent the concrete world? The theory conceptualizes the psychological representation of an entity (e.g., a particular animal) as the intersection, in a cognitive space, of the set of attributes that describe the entity. If, for young children, scales like kind-cruel and beautiful-ugly are highly correlated in a cognitive space consisting of bipolar dimensions, incongruent combinations like kind and ugly become virtually impossible to represent in the children’s cognitive spaces. To illustrate this, consider the extreme condition in which the scales are perfectly correlated. The scales would be parallel to each other in the cognitive space. Under these

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conditions, projections from kind and from ugly would be parallel to each other, and therefore would never intersect in the cognitive space. In other words, the combination of kind and ugly would have no representation in the space. If the scales were highly (though not perfectly) correlated, their projections would eventually intersect, but in a region very far from the center of the space. Other possible explanations for the disappearance of the incongruence effect in college students are also possible. For example, college students may be able to take an “abstract” attitude toward the learning task such that they react to the materials without regard to the specific meaning of the words, or by using rote learning techniques that may capitalize on the prior associations between incongruent terms. Such interpretations appear unlikely in the face of recent evidence concerning the role of processing for meaning on learning and memory (e.g., Klein & Saltz, 1976); however, they can not be ruled out completely at this time. Note that a test is possible for the hypothesis that incongruence leads to learning problems in children but not in adults because the attributes are more highly correlated for the children than for the adults. Sets of attributes could be selected that were equally correlated for the children and for the adults. If, under these circumstances, the children were no longer more disrupted by incongruence than the adults, the Saltz theory would be supported. However, if the children were still affected more than the adults under these conditions, then alternative explanations would be required. The present data also strongly suggest that by 6 years of age, children can already react to their environments in terms of bipolar dimensions, rather than in terms of relatively independent clusters of attributes. From the cluster position, we would predict that concepts consisting of congruent attributes would be relatively easy to learn, since these congruent attributes would have been subject to prior associative clustering. As Ervin and Foster (1960) state the cluster position, we would expect that attributes within a cluster would be relatively undifferentiated, with children treating them as though they were synonymous words. In contrast to the congruent sets of attributes, concepts involving incongruent sets of attributes should be no tnure difjcult to learn than concepts involving unrelated attributes since for the young child all relationships between attributes must be either congruent or unrelated; incongruence, from the clustering point of view, would be an adult notion that is relatively meaningless to the child. This set of predictions is, of course, at odds with the results of Experiment 1. Our data do not preclude the possibility that a clustering position may be tenable for children younger than those tested in Experiment 1. Previous research (cf. McNeill, 1970, pp. 1 IS- 120 for a review) shows that on word association tasks, children begin to emit paradigmatic responses (viz., responses in the same grammatical class as the stimuli) such as antonyms, by about 6 years of age. The increased occurrence of paradigmatic

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responses at this age has been interpreted as indicating that these children are initiating a restructuring of their semantic systems into a more adult form. This position suggests that at some age younger than six, children should be found to display a semantic organization based on clustering. However, this position is not completely compatible with the fact that in general 6-year-olds are just beginning to emit paradigmatic responses in word associations, yet in our data the 6-year-olds were more strongly influenced than older subjects by incongruent combinations of semantic attributes. The writers believe that the strong sensitivity to the bipolar characteristics of attribute dimensions, observed in 6-year-olds in Experiment 1, poses a problem for most theories of semantic development. The present data may require that we re-examine our previous interpretations of the fact that paradigmatic associations show an increase at around 6 years of age. One of the more unexpected findings of the present study was the asymmetry between the effects of congruence and those of incongruence. While incongruence disrupted learning, congruence did not facilitate learning. This pattern of results raises a number of questions concerning the learning variables which were operating in our study. Is the basic learning variable simply that of the associative strength between the two verbal attributes for each pictorial stimulus? This seems unlikely on the following grounds. The unrelated attributes constitute a baseline since, being unrelated, it appears unlikely that any prior associative strength could be mediating the learning of these sets of words to each other. Since the unrelated terms represent cases of essentially zero association, it seems unlikely that we could explain the disruptive effects of the incongruent sets of words on the grounds that their associative level was lower than that of the unrelated sets. Further, previous data such as those reported by Ervin and Foster (1960) suggest that evaluatively congruent sets of words are to some extent associated, even for older subjects. Yet this type of prior association was not effective in facilitating the learning of the evaluatively congruent sets of words at any age level in the present set of experiments. In short, the present pattern of results can not readily be explained in terms of the strength of association between the two verbal attributes of each concept. (The results would probably have been very different, in fact, if the present experiments had had the form of verbal paired associates, with one verbal attribute serving as stimulus and the other as response. Under those circumstances, previous verbal learning studies would lead us to expect that both congruent and incongruent relationships should facilitate learning compared to a base of unrelated verbal attributes.) The data appear to suggest strongly that young subjects have difficulty integrating attributes into a single concept when the attributes are evaluatively incongruent. One piece of evidence is inconsistent with this integration notion: the pattern of intrusion errors for 6-year-olds. If the

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original pair of attributes was incongruent, and the children recalled one word correctly but emitted an intrusion error in place of the second word, the intrusion did not tend to be congruent with the recalled word; instead, it was incongruent with the recalled word and congruent with the forgotten word. One must be cautious about overinterpreting the intrusion data, since the intrusion rate was very small. However, if replicable, these intrusion tendencies pose a problem for an integration interpretation of the incongruence effect. REFERENCES Cottrell,

N. B., Ingraham, L. H., & Menfort, F. W. The retention of balanced and unbalanced cognitive structures. Journal of Personality. 1971, 39, 112-131. Ervin, S. M., & Foster, G. The development of meaning in children’s descriptive terms. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 1960, 61, 271-275. Heider, F. The psychology ofinterpersonal relations. New York: Wiley, 1958. Klein, K., & Saltz, E. Specifying the mechanisms in a levels of processing approach to memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory, 1976, 2, 671-679.

McNeil], D. The acquisition oflanguage. New York: Harper, 1970. Osgood, C., Suci, G., & Tannenbaum, P. The measurement ofmeaning. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1957. Rubin, Z., & Zajonc, R. B. Structural bias and generalization in the learning of social structures. Journal of Personality, 1969, 37, 310-324. Saltz, E. The cognitive bases of human /earning. III.: Dorsey, 1971. Saltz, E., Dunin-Markiewicz, A., & Rourke, D. Development of natural language concepts: II. Developmental changes in attribute structure. Child Development, 1975, 46, 913-921. Saltz, E., & Hamilton, H. Concept conservation under positively and negatively evaluated transformations. Journal ofExperimental Child Psychology, 1968, 6, 44-51. Saltz, E., & Medow, M. L. Concept conservation in children: The dependence of belief systems on semantic representation. Child Development. 1971, 42, 1533- 1542. Zajonc, R. B., & Burnstein, E. The learning of balanced and unbalanced social structures. Journal of Personality, 1965, 33, 153- 163. (a) Zajonc, R. B., & Burnstein, E. Structural balance, reciprocity, and positivity as sources of cognitive bias. Journal of Personality, 1965, 33, 570-583. (b) RECEIVED: February 11, 1977: REVISED: February

15, 1977.