Infants prefer to listen to happy speech. To assess influences of speech affect on early lexical processing, 7.5- and 10.5-month-old infants were familiarized with one word spoken with happy affect and another with neutral affect and then tested on recognition of these words in fluent passages. Infants heard all passages either with happy affect…

This article reviews recent research on perception of tangible pictures in sighted and blind people. Haptic picture naming accuracy is dependent upon familiarity and access to semantic memory, just as in visual recognition. Performance is high when haptic picture recognition tasks do not depend upon semantic memory. Viewpoint matters for the ease…

Two experiments sought to extend the demonstration of English-learning infants' abilities to segment nouns from fluent speech to a new lexical class: verbs. Moreover, we explored whether two factors previously shown to influence noun segmentation, stress pattern (strong-weak or weak-strong) and type of initial phoneme (consonant or vowel), also…

Providing distance learners access to library services does not automatically translate into usage of those resources. The literature on information-seeking behaviour of distance learners has indicated that they prefer to use local resources, as well as Web-based resources. This study investigates perspectives on library services and available…

This article examines alternating verbs (such as "quemar"(se) "to burn") in second language (L2) Spanish by considering the learnability problem from a sequence learning perspective (N. Ellis, 1996, 2002). In Spanish, verbs of the alternating class are obligatorily marked with the clitic "se" in their intransitive form. Errors of omission among…

Despite increasing interest in interlanguage pragmatics research, research on assessment of this crucial area of second language competence still lags behind assessment of other aspects of learners' developing second language (L2) competence. This study describes the development and validation of a 36-item web-based test of ESL pragmalinguistics,…

Two studies compared the performance of Puerto Rican and African American Head Start children (total n=134) on familiar (description) and unfamiliar (one word labeling) test tasks. Results indicated children performed better on the familiar test task, which was also more sensitive in differentiating typically developing children from those with…

A study of the attitudes of 821 secondary-level students in British Columbia (Canada) found that the majority supported mainstreaming of handicapped students in their classes, females were more positive than males, older students were more positive than younger students, and physical contact with handicapped students did not automatically lead to…

Sixteen Canadian graduate students in educational psychology interviewed 2 Indian subjects each using Kohlberg moral dilemmas and Gilligan real-life problems. Student attitudes toward Indians were positively affected by subject self-disclosure. Attitude change was not related to student cognitive complexity. Contains 11 references. (SV)

Identifies conceptual and methodological strengths of Hawley and Little's article and commends the pedagogical value of the approach taken. Notes that questions still unanswered concern the validity of adult caregiver perceptions of social dominance, the relationship between competition hierarchies and hierarchies based on directed agonism, and…

The attitudes of 144 high school students toward individuals with mental retardation were examined using the Mental Retardation Attitude Inventory-Revised. Results indicated that gender and frequency of contact both influenced attitudes. Females and students with more frequent contacts with individuals with mental retardation indicated more…

Studies the relationship between attitudes toward Americans and social contact with Americans by Arab students at U.S. universities. Uses causal process-analysis and path analysis to show that desire for contact significantly mediated between attitude and contact, and that social contact was not significantly mediated by understanding of the host…

Using members of professional associations who are a part of the Council for the Advancement of Standards in Higher Education (CAS) consortia as a sample, this study investigated who uses CAS Standards, how and why they are used, and whether CAS Standards are associated with enhanced student learning. Using a quantitative analysis, this study…

Experimental analysis of social stimuli has typically been restricted to the presence or absence of verbal attention. In the present study, an ABAB design was used to assess the influence of proximity as a social stimulus. Close and distant proximity of a familiar adult was systematically manipulated to evaluate the effect of proximity on the…

In this study we analysed the familiarity and understanding of 10 environmental concepts amongst Mexican and English school children (aged 7 to 9). The investigation considered the impact of the educational system and the school ethos on the formation of environmental concepts. Results reveal that in general, children of this age have a low to…