Is there a temporal basis of the word length effect? A response to Service (1998)

Service (1998) carried out a study of the word length effect with Finnish pseudowords in which short and long pseudowords were identical except for the inclusion of certain phonemes differing only in pronunciation length, a manipulation that is impossible in English. She obtained an effect of phonemic complexity but little or no word duration effect per se - a discrepancy from the expectations generated by the well-known working memory model of Baddeley (1986). In the present study using English words, we controlled for phonemic complexity differences by using the same words for the short- and long-word sets, but with instructions inducing shorter or longer pronunciation of the words. We obtained substantial word duration effects. Concerns raised by Service are addressed, and we conclude that both duration and complexity are likely to contribute to the word length effect in serial recall.     

Preservation Theorems Without Continuum Hypothesis

Many results concerning the equivalence between a syntactic form of formulas and a model theoretic conditions are proven directly without using any form of a continuum hypothesis. In particular, it is demonstrated that any reduced product sentence is equivalent to a Horn sentence. Moreover, in any first order language without equality one now has that a reduced product sentence is equivalent to a Horn sentence and any sentence is equivalent to a Boolean combination of Horn sentences.     

The PC tachistoscope has 32 pages

Page switching is the basis of the PC tachistoscope, and usual accounts of page switching on the PC refer to a maximum of 8 available pages. This article shows how to achieve up to 16 pages in 40-column text mode and up to 32 pages in low-resolution graphics mode using conventional page switching combined with the bit-plane layering technique described by Bokhorst (1995). A high level C program is presented to show how this is done. When 32 pages are in use, the images must be monochrome.