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their stress on adults being concerned with the development of, and being distinguishable by, domains of expertise, may hint that the encapsulation model may only hold for the personall social domain. I don’t think it does, but the book fails to offer strong arguments that this hunch is unsustainable.

Overall, then, this book offers a very interesting and novel approach to the question of the growth of cognitive abilities across the age span, with special emphasis on adulthood. It takes one so far, but then seems to falter. It offers a needed window on adult cognition but when one examines the detail of the shadows seen so clearly from afar, one finds that the glass is semi-opaque rather than transparent. This may be because, as the authors themselves caution, the book represents one ‘relatively frozen moment in our developing awareness of the parameters and meanings of adult cognitive change’. It is a pity that the book seems to have been written just too early, before the heat of detail was sufficient to thaw the frost of speculation. Nonetheless, there is a distinct impression that we are, at least, at the right window.

B. R. CLIFFORD

THE MAIN SOURCE: LEARNING FROM TELEVISION NEWS, J. Robinson and M. R. Levy. Sage, Beverly Hills, 1986. No. of pages: 272. ISBN 0-8039-2569-7 (cloth), f28; 0-8039-25704 (paperback), f14.

This book, with contributions by Dennis Davis, Gill Woodall, Michael Gurevitch and Haluk Sahin, sums up 20 years study of the flow of news by John Robinson’s group, covering various news content areas, research designs and cultural contexts. It enhances order in an area of often piecemeal and ‘contradictory’ studies of less methodological and critical rigour than one would wish. It is also laced with an unusual degree of plain good sense.

The authors show that TV is not the main source of news, as has been claimed, and that current practice is neither very effective nor totally ineffective. It seems the success of TV journalists in communicating news depends more on presentation factors than on motivational ones as usually conceived. Support for ‘uses and gratifications’ notions is notably meagre. One may cavil at the methodological adequacy of individual studies, but the strength of the evidence lies in the consistency of results across studies of news awareness and media usage patterns (chapter 3), of the effect of a week’s news (chapter 4) or a single newscast (chapter 5) and analysis of story attributes (chapter 8).

Though the point is not stressed explicitly, a major significance of the book lies in its bearing on the question of ‘ecological validity’, a slogan espoused perhaps beyond the call of healthy scepticism by those for whom the conclusions of laboratory studies, or perhaps laboratory studies themselves, are uncongenial. In showing the importance of prior knowledge of news affairs, the generally beneficial effects of TV presentation and the negative impact of some current practices, e.g. using ‘vivid’ pictures and chaining stories from the same news category, the studies on live audiences described in the book consistently produce the same conclusions as laboratory studies. Woodall’s chapter 6 on information-processing theory and television news curiously rather assumes the point that so many have questioned, and represents laboratory studies unproblematically as providing the means of analysing in a more precise way effects deduced from field studies. This keystone chapter would benefit by being both longer and more up-to-date. It is perhaps churlish to regret that in a book whose major virtue lies in its broad sweep of theory and data, more attention is not given to text structure, misunderstanding of news messages and the problem of alleged bias. The book certainly points the way to a coordinated attack on such issues from inside and outside the laboratory.

Woodall’s more speculative thoughts are especially interesting. No narrow experimentalist, he goes beyond highlighting the importance of individual differences in knowledge levels for news learning to consider, inter aka, investigating the structure of subordinate information domains in semantic structures and the possible role of attitudes and beliefs in the deep processing of news information. How audience members construct notions of social reality

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from news messages that may have implicit ideological or causal models, and how this is related to their existing ‘picture of the world’, are the difficult and tantalizing questions following on from this that are briefly but bravely tackled by Gurevitch and Levy in the next chapter. A major practical achievement of this book may prove to be that in contributing so much to clarifying questions of important factors in news learning, it will prepare the way for an attack on the more demanding issues of the effects of news on social understanding as glimpsed through the smoke in the promising preliminary skirmishes in this chapter.

The final chapters have strong words on the broadcasting industry, on the inability of journalists and administrators to digest scientific evidence, their lack of interest in assisting audience comprehension, and indeed unawareness of audience needs and capacities. Lighting a candle rather than cursing the dark, the authors make sensible suggestions for improved TV news organization and practice. It will indeed be an indictment of the industry if its practitioners continue to ignore the well-founded evidence and the helpful suggestions that are offered here. It is salutory to be reminded that it is not enough to deliver research which is applicable; one must persuade ‘practical people’ to apply it. Here, as the last chapter’s title implies, we are dealing with something ‘beyond comprehension’.

COLIN BERRY

LINK WORD LANGUAGE SYSTEM, M. M. Gruneberg. Corgi Books, Transworld Publishers, London. No. of pages: 228. Price f3.95 (paperback). ISBN 0-552-13054-0. THE GRUNEBERG LINK WORD LANGUAGE COURSE, M. M. Gruneberg, Access Software, London.*

The Link Word Language System provides foreign-language instruction via a series of books and software disks. The books and disks are sold separately and have been designed to be used independently. At present the books and tapes provide instruction in three languages: French, German, and Spanish.

The system teaches a core vocabulary and some aspects of grammar with the link-word (sometimes called the key-word) mnemonic. This mnemonic requires a person to learn a link-word when attempting to memorize that a foreign-language word is the translation of an English word. The link-word is selected to have a pronunciation that suggests the pronunciation of the foreign word. Typically the link-word is made memorable by putting it in a sentence whose content is easily imagined. For example, in learning that the German word for potato is Kurtoffel, the student learns the link-word ‘carting off while imaging ‘carting off a load of potatoes’.

The link-word method is widely known among memory researchers and commercial memory trainers. It was brought to the attention of psychologists by Atkinson and Raugh in 1975. At that time these researchers reported that Russian students who used the method in studying Russian vocabulary learned substantially more vocabulary words in a session than students who studied without link-words. Since Atkinson and Raugh’s research, Pressley and colleagues have shown the link-word method to be effective in other kinds of instruction (e.g. learning definitions of English words) and for children and adults (see Pressley, Levin, and Delaney , 1982). The effectiveness of the link-word system is particularly interesting because most applications of classical mnemonics have been found wanting by cognitive psychologists (see Baddeley, 1976; Herrmann, Rea, and Andrzejewski, 1987; Parks, Smith, and Cavanaugh, 1986).

*An audio-tape is also available separately from Corgi Books, $5.95. Computer versions are available in French, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Dutch, Greek, Portuguese and Hebrew on IBM PC, Apple 11, C64, MAC, Price $29 from Artwork Inc. 1844 Penfield Road, Penfield, New York. Computer versions are also available from Perspective Software, 100 Baker Street, London.