Fifty years after the publication of Skinner's "Verbal Behavior", some possibilities for the future of Skinner's "science of verbal behavior" are considered. Specifically, certain areas of development or advancement are examined which might be of special importance to the expansion and influence of the functional analysis of verbal behavior.…

In a classification task, preschoolers matched a target stimulus with a conventional category, a visually similar item that cut across conventional categories, or an unrelated item. Items were presented in picture, verbal, and picture-verbal conditions. In all conditions, conventional classifications outnumbered visual ones, and this difference…

The aims of this study were (1) to assess the relative effectiveness of verbal and visual elaboration prompts and question-answering prompts on children's incidental memory, and (2) to determine whether performance improvement associated with pictorial elaboration could be augmented by either verbal elaboration or question-answering procedures.…

Demonstrates young children's shift toward a taxonomic basis for organization of both named and depicted objects. Concludes that perceptual organization in young children cannot be attributed to an inability to ignore visual information but seems to be based upon the centrality of perceptual features to the representation of objects. (Author/NH)

This paper explores relationships of visual images to verbal elements, beginning with a discussion of visible language as represented by words printed on the page. The visual flexibility inherent in typography is discussed in terms of the appearance of the letters and the denotative and connotative meanings represented by type, typographical…

Examines developmental change in processes used to retrieve information from semantic memory. Twenty-nine 8-, 12-, and 21-year-olds were asked to name as many animals and pieces of furniture as they could in separate 7-minute intervals. Results suggested that information in semantic memory changes with age, but that retrieval processes do not.…

Research has demonstrated the occurrence of two structurally distinct modes of vocalization in the infant/mother pair--coaction and alternation--that change developmentally over the first year of the infant's life. The present study investigated the vocalization latencies of three infant/mother pairs at three stages of infant development: at 10…

This study investigated the research construct of encoding specificity using an applied research orientation. Encoding specificity considers the effects on memory of the interactive relationship among encoding, the stored memory trace, and external retrieval cues. Subjects were 273 undergraduate students enrolled in the College of Engineering at…

The incidental memory of young children was tested for words or words plus pictures that were initially presented under orienting conditions. These conditions required responses to acoustic or semantic qualities of the stimuli and an affirmative or negative response to the orienting questions. (PCB)

This study examined the possibility that expectancy or anticipatory reactions influence the ability to read. The Event Related Potentials (ERPs) of 10 dyslexic Mexican male students (ages 11 to 13) and eight normal male students of the same age range were evaluated. ERPs were measured while the children read words, both in and out of context, that…

A stages-of-learning model was used to examine effects of picture-word manipulation on storage and retrieval differences between disabled and nondisabled grade 2 and 6 children. Results showed that disabled students are poorer at memory tasks and in developing the ability to reliably retrieve information than nondisabled children. (Author/RH)

Following instruction using a stimulus equivalence procedure to teach matching of dictated picture names with printed words, two preschool children were also able to match pictures with printed words, match printed words with pictures, or match printed words with oral names. Results have implications for teaching early reading skills. (Author/DB)

This study tested whether conditioning to one member of a compound stimulus can be blocked by presence of a second member to which the response was previously conditioned. Eight mentally retarded students (ages 7-9) were presented with words, sometimes accompanied by pictures. Six students performed best when words were presented without pictures.…

This study compared three methods of stimulus preference assessment for four verbal children (ages six to nine) with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, specifically evaluating the utility of a verbal choice procedure for assessing relative reinforcer value. Verbal and pictorial stimulus-choice assessments identified high- and low-preference…

This study was designed to determine whether children 3, 4, and 5 years of age could demonstrate their metaphorical competence equally well in words and in pictures. Previous studies which have investigated young children's metaphorical ability have often encouraged young children to make judgments of similarity which rely almost exclusively on…