Concept availability in the causal inferences of children and adults.

What supplies the concepts in causal inferences in story comprehension? This question was examined in 5 experiments. Elementary school children and college students listened to stories containing a "premise" sentence describing a character's intent in initiating a series of actions, followed by an unexpected "outcome." After each story, the subjects were asked inference questions about the reason for the outcome (Experiments 1-4) or asked to explain the outcome (Experiment 5).

Place and action in children's representations of stories.

The purpose of the four experiments was to examine the prominence of place and action information in the story representations of second (7-year-old), fifth (10-year-old), and sixth (11-year-old) grade children and college students. The subjects were read short stories in which the information in a premise and an outcome sentence were consistent or inconsistent in describing place or action information. Judgments about story adequacy and the conditional probability of an inadequacy judgment given inconsistency detection were measures of prominence in the story representation, and prominence was manipulated by providing place titles, action titles, or no titles.

Stresses created by occlusal prematurities in a new photoelastic model system.

A new photoelastic model system incorporating a simulated periodontal ligament sleeve around an experimental first molar has been developed. The system was used to visualize internal compressive stresses created by various premature occlusal incline relationships in both buccolingual and mesiodistal dimensions. When prematurities were applied singly and observed buccolingually, both class 1 and and class 2 prematurities produced stresses along the lingual aspect of the root, whereas the class 3 prematurity produced stresses along the buccal aspect of the root.