Miller (1956) summarized evidence that people can remember about seven chunks in short-term memory (STM) tasks. However, that number was meant more as a rough estimate and a rhetorical device than as a real capacity limit. Others have since suggested that there is a more precise capacity limit, but that it is only three to five chunks. The present target article brings together a wide variety o...

An intelligent agent or problem solver is expected to solve a problem correctly and efficiently, communicate the solution and also explain the reasoning behind the solution. Several problem solving paradigms are available, each having its own advantages. Model based planners are very robust but at increased computational cost while case based methods are often more efficient. In this paper we e...

Purpose: We investigated lexical representations of children with specific language impairment (SLI) and typically developing chronological age-matched (CA) peers on a frequency manipulated gating task. We tested the hypothesis that children with SLI have holistic phonological representations of words, i.e. that children with SLI would exhibit smaller effects of neighborhood density on gating d...

In the framework of the Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) and lexical transfer in Machine Translation (MT), the representation of word meanings is one critical issue. The conceptual vector model aims at representing thematic activations for chunks of text, lexical entries, up to whole documents. Roughly speaking, vectors are supposed to encode ideas associated to words or expressions. In this pap...

The Possible Word Constraint limits the number of lexical candidates considered in speech recognition by stipulating that input should be parsed into a string of lexically viable chunks. For instance, an isolated single consonant is not a feasible word candidate. Any segmentation containing such a chunk is disfavored. Five experiments using the head-turn preference procedure investigated whethe...

We assessed a hypothesis that working memory capacity should include a constant number of separate mental units, or chunks (cf. Miller, 1956). Because of the practical difficulty of measuring chunks, this hypothesis has not been tested previously, despite wide attention to Miller's article. We used a training procedure to manipulate the strength of associations between pairs of words to be incl...

There is a crucial debate concerning the nature of chess chunks: One current possibility states that chunks are built by encoding particular combinations of pieces-on-squares (POSs), and that chunks are formed mostly by "close" pieces (in a "Euclidean" sense). A complementary hypothesis is that chunks are encoded by abstract, semantic information. This article extends recent experiments and sho...