No abstract

The purpose of this research was to establish norms for the relative frequency of use of the different meaning of common homographs (words that have one spelling but two or more distinctly different meanings) and to present ratings of the concreteness-abstractness of those meanings. A total of 108 subjects wrote a phrase or sentence using each of 120 homographs that were presented at a 15.5-sec rate. For each homograph, norms are provided indicating the relative frequency with which each meaning was used by men and by women. In addition, four judges rated the concreteness-abstractness of each meaning. These ratings are also provided, as are the means of the overall concreteness for each homograph.

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Although memory experts have long advocated the use of bizarre imagery to aid memory, most research has failed to find bizarreness to be effective. Recently, bizarreness has been shown to be effective, but those experiments involved mixed lists in which each subject had both bizarre and nonbizarre materials. The goal of the present research was to use the same materials but in an unmixed-list design in which each subject had only bizarre or only nonbizarre sentences.Contrary to previous research, there were no significant differences between bizarre and nonbizarre conditions in terms of the number of individual words recalled, and bizarreness produced significantly lower recall of complete sentences. It was concluded that bizarreness is effective only when bizarre and nonbizarre materials are provided by the experimenter in a mixed-list situation.

Laparoscopic bowel surgery is a recent application of minimally invasive videoscopic techniques. Understanding the anatomy and physiology of the bowel, the background of bowel disorders and their treatment, signs and symptoms of bowel disease, and the patient selection process can help perioperative nurses better care for patients diagnosed with colon polyps, diverticulitis, and inflammatory bowel disease.