The original studies of menial rotation estimated rates of imagining rotations that were much slower when two simultaneously portrayed three-dimensional shapes were to be compared (R. Shepard & J. Metzler) than when one two-dimensional shape was to be compared with a previously learned two-dimensional shape (Cooper and her associates). In a 2 x 2 design, we orthogonally varied dimensionality of objects and type of task. Both factors affected reaction times. Type of task was the primary determiner of estimated rate of mental rotation, which was about three times higher for the single-stimulus task. Dimensionality primarily affected an additive component of all reaction times, suggesting that more initial encoding is required for three-dimensional shapes. In the absence of a satisfactory way of controlling stimulus complexity, the results are at least consistent with the proposal that once three-dimensional objects have been encoded, their rotation can be imagined as rapidly as the rotation of two-dimensional shapes.

In Experiment 1, 328 adjectives were presented to subjects for rating of imagery (I), ease of definition (ED), and animateness (A). The normative value of these indices is tabulated for each adjective. A correlational analysis of these measures and Kucera-Francis frequency (KF) is also presented. To demonstrate the usefulness of these rating scales, Experiment 2 requested subjects to free recall a list of 50 adjectives after they completed an incidental learning task of rating these adjectives for I, ED, or A. The subjects recalled more high I than low I adjectives and more difficult-than easy-to-define adjectives regardless of which incidental rating task they performed. Neither the degree of animateness nor the KF value of the adjectives influenced the percentage of recall.Normative data on the attributes of words relevant to their storage and retrieval characteristics exist for nouns (e.g., Paivio, Yuille, & Madigan, 1968) and for verbs (e.g., Klee & Legge, 1976), but similar data are not readily available for adjectives, despite a considerable interest in the role played by adjectives in the memory of phrases and sentences. For example, Kusyszyn and Paivio (1966) have studied the recall of adjective-noun pairs as a function of word order and of noun abstractness. Horowitz and Manelis (1972) have studied the degree of unity between adjective-noun pairs and the kinds of bonding that exist. Deese (1965) andJohnson (1970) have found that a noun generally elicits a greater diversity of associates than does an adjective. Lockhart (1969) andPeterson (1971) attempted to study the effect of the imagery rating and grammatical classification (noun or adjective) on cued and free recall. Unfortunately, Lockhart did not have normative data on the adjectives and nominalized Requests for reprints should be sent to Neal

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The ConstituentObject Parser is a shallow syntactic parser designed to produce dependency tree representations of syntactic structure that can be used to specify the intended meanings of a sentence more precisely than can the key terms of the sentence alone. It is intended to improve the precision/ recall performance of information retrieval and similar text processing applications by providing more powerful matching procedures. The dependency tree representation and the relationship between the intended use of this parser and its design is described, and several problems concerning the processing of ambiguous structures are discussed.

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