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Reviews research relevant to children's understanding of pervasive, naturally occurring individual differences in thoughts and beliefs. Identifies developmental changes for each form of understanding: false belief, origins of knowledge, ambiguity, explicit judgments of knowledge, communication, and information seeking. Argues that considering preexisting differences in belief provides an important complement to situational emphases that have characterized theory-of-mind research. (Author/KB)

People are generally reluctant to transmit bad news to others. To examine this reluctance, college students (N=96) were randomly assigned to two conditions (i.e., assistant or confederate subject). Assistants administered a "psychological inventory" to confederate subjects. Student assistants believed the subject had previously taken one inventory and had either done well or poorly. Further, students believed the previous test results were either valid (low ambiguity) or of questionable validity (high ambiguity). The confederate then requested feedback from the assistant and their responses were recorded. Analyses of results showed that the students transmitted positive information more readily than negative information, and that they spoke more in high-ambiguous rather than low-ambiguous conditions. Research varying task importance is needed. (WAS)

In this study, 30 male college students from two weightlifting classes and 30 female college students enrolled in an educational psychology course designed specifically for music education majors were asked to read two ambiguous passages, each of which could be interpreted in two different ways. The first passage could be perceived as describing either a prison break or a wrestling match, while the second could be understood as detailing either an evening of card playing or a rehearsal session of a woodwind ensemble. Scores on multiple-choice tests, the content of written themes, and comments in free recall of the passage indicated a striking relationship between the subjects' backgrounds and their interpretation of the selections. These results indicate that high-level schemata provide the interpretive framework for comprehending discourse. The fact that most subjects reported being unaware of alternative interpretations suggests that schemata can cause people to "see" a message in light of their own frame of reference. Tables of findings are included. (Author/KS)

This study attempted to elucidate the effects of context and level of processing on comprehension and memory for prose. Two aspects of memory for prose were investigated: the amount of information remembered and the semantic interpretation assigned to ambiguous paragraphs. Task instructions and exposure duration of the passages were manipulated to induce different levels of processing and to affect the amount of information retained. In order to influence the interpretation of the ambiguous paragraphs, different contexts, in the form of titles which would create bias, accompanied the text. Recall and recognition measures indicated that students remembered more information and more context-consonant information when given instructions which required processing the paragraphs at a semantic level. Thus, context determined which meaning was remembered from polysemous paragraphs only when incoming information was processed at a deeper, more semantic level. Tables of findings are included. (Author/JM)

Two experiments concerned with memory and comprehension of prose passages were conducted with children from second through seventh grade. In both experiments the major variable was the provision of appropriate frameworks for comprehending ambiguous sections of the passages. In the initial experiment, recognition of theme-congruent and theme-incongruent foils was the main measurement, while, in the second experiment, intrusions in recall and postrecall interviews were used to measure the influence of preexisting expectations on story comprehension and recall. The main effect was the striking absence of developmental trends: children behaved like adults in both the recall and recognition studies. Recall of ambiguous passages was enhanced if a relevant framework was given, intrusions reflected the prior orientation, and the subjects had difficulty distinguishing between their own embellishments and the actual story content. Under recognition conditions, children treated theme-congruent foils as if they were target items and incongruent foils as if they were distractors. It is argued that, for children as well as for adults, schemata provide the interpretive framework for comprehending discourse. (Author)

Thirty informants were presented with sets of clauses punctuated as in the pattern "S1. If S2. S3" and asked which clause, S1 or S3, the "if" clause modified. Independently, several linguists judged the sentences "S1, if S2" and "S2, if S3" acceptable. Missing intonational clues or improper punctuation, which frequently occurs in advertising, could force a processing grammar to disambiguate the qualification in the above. Semantic data alone prove insufficient for this disambiguation process; anaphoric and temporal relationships will serve to disambiguate in such cases, but are not always present. If Strawson's "Indirectness Condition" is elaborated by examining the types of non-truth-functional relationships leading from the antecedent to the consequent, a hierarchy which predicts the informants' selections is established. This pragmatic hierarchy, causal/pseudo-causal/inductive/inductive and deductive/deductive, would aid the processing of potentially ambiguous clasuses. It is claimed that the same hierarchy could be applied to disambiguate sentences of the forms "S1. If S2. S3." Further, it is claimed that this hierarchy applies within a generative grammar to limit the acceptability of conjoining arbitrary sentences with "if." (Author/TL)

This study tests the hypothesis that persons will express relatively independent degrees of preference for ambiguity in different experiential domains. An original measure consisting of four subscales was developed to assess individual differences in the theoretical, social, economic and aesthetic domains, and was administered to a student sample. Comparisons between split half reliabilities of each subscale, and correlations with other subscales support the hypothesis in the theoretical, social and aesthetic domains. Results are interpreted as indicating that tolerance for ambiguity may be stable within but not across experiential domains. It is suggested that appropriate measurement may best be achieved by conceptualizing tolerance for ambiguity as a domain specific trait. (Author)

Anthropologists have indicated that the need to act politically and to avoid the appearance of such action is marked in egalitarian societies. The perils of confrontation in such societies often foster indirect and highly allusive speech. This paper invesitgates the relationship between direct and indirect speech in an Indo-Fijian community which presents a case of the association of oblique oratory with an egalitarian social order. Two varieties of public performance are analyzed: (1) the "parbachan" or religious speeches which ostensibly deal with sacred topics but which carry a second, political message as well; and (2) the "panchayat," an ad hoc arbitration session organized to deal with a specific conflict in the community. Here issues, events, and individuals are discussed openly. While there is a range of political performances in this community, the dominant mode of conflict communication is indirection. Public political messages are deeply buried in religious speeches, and individual speakers cannot be held responsible for the secondary meanings. This accords with the notion that oblique reference is characteristic of political talk among equals. (AMH)

Two experiments on the processing of lexical ambiguities in spoken prose were conducted using college students as subjects. The studies focused on noun-noun ambiguities, e.g. "straw" and "organ." The experiments utilized a variable stimulus onset asynchrony priming paradigm in which an auditory stimulus is followed at a variable interval (either 0 or 200 milliseconds) by a target word related to one meaning of the ambiguous word. For example, "Although the farmer bought the straw..." would be followed by "hay" or "sip." In the first experiment, with ambiguous words appearing in contexts that did not favor either reading, subjects accessed multiple readings or meanings at one millisecond but retained only a single reading 200 milliseconds later. In the second experiment, with ambiguous words appearing in contexts that provided semantic information relevant to only one reading, listeners accessed only a single reading at both stimulus onsets. The results suggest that selective access will occur for this class of ambiguous words when a word in the context primes one reading of a subsequent ambiguous word. (Author/MKM)

Employee growth need strength (EGNS) is defined as a worker's need to obtain "growth" satisfaction from his work. The moderating influence of EGNS on relationships between global job satisfaction and the job attributes of conflict and ambiguity were investigated. Production supervisors (N=57) completed questionnaires on role perceptions, job satisfaction, and EGNS. Results from moderated regression analysis suggest that EGNS significantly influences the relationship between role-conflict and satisfaction, but does not significantly influence the relationship between role-ambiguity and satisfaction. Findings point out the importance of individual differences as a moderator of the relationships between job attributes and employee affective response. Results also contribute to the construct validation of the trait of EGNS. (Author/NRB)

A study was conducted (1) to examine the development of comprehension and production in written language of two aspects of linguistic knowledge, knowledge of ambiguity and paraphrase; and (2) to examine the influences of reading ability as measured by currently used standardized reading tests and of sex on the development of this knowledge of ambiguity and paraphrase. Sixty-two fourth grade students were given eight sentences containing ambiguity and asked to provide two or more interpretations of each sentence. A second study was carried out with 24 good and poor readers from fourth, seventh, and tenth grades, and 16 good and poor adult readers. Results of the two studies showed that poorer readers made more than twice the number of errors than did better readers in each domain of the task--syntax, morphology, semantics, and transcription. The findings also revealed that in the sentence task, the order of difficulty of the varying metalinguistic tasks was the same across modes of processing, but that there were sharper differences between good and poor fourth grade readers and in good and poor adult readers in certain tasks. (HOD)

A study was conducted to examine the ways individuals in organizations interpreted and responded to ambiguous messages. Using Karl Weick's model of organizing, investigators measured the number of rules (criteria for taking action), the number of people, and the frequencies of message categories generated in two simulated organizations comprised of 51 college students. The students acted in company positions at three organizational levels--upper management, middle management, and work groups (foremen and workers)--and responded individually and collectively to high, medium, and low ambiguous organizational messages. The results showed that the subjects used more rules and more people to process high ambiguous messages than they did to process low ambiguous messages. Analysis of group interaction revealed that most groups spent their talk time reducing equivocality. Workers and foremen reduced ambiguity by adding interpretations while managers proposed specific action steps. Overall, the study indicated that misunderstandings in organizations might evolve from divergent approaches to the management of equivocality. Since some degree of equivocality is present in all organizational input, the way individuals interpret and process this ambiguity is a key to understanding how organizations make sense of their activities. (RL)

A study examined the effects of conversational themes and attention-focusing strategies on conversational comprehension. The variables in the study were (1) the presentation of ambiguous versus unambiguous themes of conversations, (2) using personal versus content-oriented themes in conversations, and (3) presenting listeners with personal versus content attention-focusing strategies (asking participants to focus on a personality type versus focusing on the content of the message). The subjects were 247 college students who were divided into 16 groups that heard various combinations of the three variables and two stimulus messages. After the subjects received the attention-focusing strategy and theme statement appropriate to their experimental group, they listened to the stimulus conversation and completed recall accuracy and uncertainty reduction tests. The posttests were administered again one week following the experiment. The results demonstrated that unambiguous themes predicted conversational comprehensibility and recall accuracy. Type of theme also had a significant impact on these dependent measures as well as on uncertainty reduction. The results suggested that personal conversational information may be processed differently from content conversational information. (RL)

Five experiments were conducted on the ways that college students processed ambiguous words in sentences. Two classes of ambiguous words (noun-noun and noun-verb) and two types of context (priming and nonpriming) were investigated using a variable stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) priming paradigm. Noun-noun ambiguities consisted of two semantically unrelated readings that were nouns (e.g., pen, organ); noun-verb ambiguities had both noun and verb readings that were unrelated (e.g., tire, watch). Priming contexts contained words that were highly related semantically or associatively to one meaning of the ambiguous word; nonpriming contexts favored one meaning of the word through other types of information. In nonpriming contexts, the subjects consistently accessed multiple meanings of words, and selected one reading within 200 msec. Lexical priming differentially affected the processing of subsequent noun-noun and noun-verb ambiguities, yielding selective access of meaning only in the former case. The results suggested that meaning access is an automatic process that is unaffected by knowledge-based (top-down) processing. Whether selective or multiple access of meaning is observed depends largely on the structure of the ambiguous word, not the nature of the context. (Author/RL)

This exploratory study seeks to explain variation in conflict and ambiguity among a national sample of directors of school district research and evaluation units. The approach developed argues that variation in evaluation unit directors' role conflict and ambiguity is a function of both school district and evaluation unit characteristics, since both sets of organizational features influence the political/economic context within which the director must function. It is also argued that the social resource characteristics of the school district, that is, the external context within which evaluation units function, and the organization of the unit itself, are key sources of information about them, and particularly about the amount of conflict and ambiguity confronted by the directors. (Author/GK)

Investigations using English have shown that a number of linguistic constructions associated with reporting verbs, and verbs concerning plans, present comprehension difficulties to children over the age of five. The corresponding constructions in Greek involved ambiguity appreciation, and tests of monoglots and bilinguals indicated that a cognitive developmental stage is implicated in ambiguity appreciation. Striking contrasts between the results from Greek children, who did not appreciate ambiguity, and what would be expected on the basis of English studies forced an appeal to semantics in explaining comprehension difficulty. Testing a wide range of constructions with fewer reporting verbs demonstrated that semantic theories which invoked speakers' intentions could not provide a general explanation of comprehension difficulties. What seemed to be developing was a gradual mastery of the way reporting verbs gave meaning to, and took meaning from, the constructions in which they can stand. The fact that results from monoglots were language-particular made possible a test of bilingual children to evaluate theories about their development. Existing theories implied that results from bilinguals would be qualitatively different. There was no support for such predictions. What occurred was a greater frequency of the same misapprehensions about the meanings of reporting verbs that had been obtained with monoglots. (Author/CFM)