ABSTRACT
In this chapter, empirical findings are presented pertaining to the propositions that symbol systems vary with respect to the amount of mental elaboration and the kinds of mental skills they require to extract knowledge from them. It is extremely difficult to test these propositions by contrasting symbol systems, because, as was seen in Chapter Three, symbol systems differ as to the kinds of content they represent. Hence, it would be virtually impossible to manipulate experimentally only symbol systems without at the same time also varying content. Indeed, whenever such experimental manipulations were attempted, covariatons of extracted meaning were either welcome (Meringoff, 1978) or equated (Rosenberg and Simon, 1977).
