indirect speech act

a speech act whose purpose is not explicit from the form or content of the utterance but must be inferred. For example, the apparent observation It’s so cold in here! may well be intended as a request that someone close the window. See conversational inference; form–function distinction; implicature.

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Psychology term of the day

December 23rd 2024

factor theory

in classical test theory, the supposition that a set of correlated variables can be reduced to a smaller set of underlying dimensions or factors. It follows that each person’s observed score can be represented by a factor loading times a factor plus error variance.