Two experiments were done with a 16-year-old severely retarded male, involving the training of generalized instruction-following responses to preposition-noun combinations. (Author/DLS)

Vocal and object-directed behaviors of parents and infants were examined according to the social-construction view of development. Interactions of 66 infant-parent dyads were observed. Normative changes and stability of individual differences of joint-action variables and the relation of these variables to 30-month cognitive-development status…

Thirty normal geriatric individuals, who had been randomly assigned to one of three feedback modes, were instructed to produce a phrase at slow, average, and fast speaking rates. Results suggest that visual-verbal and verbal-quantitative feedback lead to significantly better performance than verbal-qualitative feedback, particularly when the task…

Four preschoolers (ages 4-5) received self-instructional training in overt and covert self-verbalizations. Treatment effects were evident in the training setting. Generalization of self-verbalizations to the classroom setting was related to changes in performance accuracy, on-task behavior, and efficiency in completing academic work. (Author/JW)

Investigates (in two phases) how coherence is cued between turns in conversations. Indicates that (1) turns were consistently paired well beyond chance, suggesting that explicit cues to connections between turns in conversations do exist; and (2) only lexical devices were found significantly more often in coherent than incoherent pairs. (NKA)

The release from proactive interference task as used to investigate categorical encoding of items. Low socioeconomic status Black and middle socioeconomic status White children were compared. Conceptual encoding differences between these populations were not detected in automatic conceptual encoding but were detected when the free recall method…

Examines imitation of motor, vocal, and verbal behaviors by infants 10 to 16 months old. The imitation battery consisted of 21 behaviors in four motor and two vocal categories. The familiarity or novelty of individual behaviors was assessed through maternal interviews. Results are discussed in terms of Uzgaris' (1981) conceptualization of two…

Children aged 6 to 13 years were given verbal and nonverbal fluency tasks and block design subtests of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised. Results, providing normative data, showed that fluency tasks are age-, but not sex-dependent, and are modestly correlated to one another. (Author/CM)

Two visual search experiments suggest that: cerebral lateralization of cognitive functions results from differences in sensorimotor resolution capacities of the hemispheres; both hemispheres can process verbal and visuospatial information analytically and holistically; and respective hemispheric competence is a function of the level of…

Human performance on verbal and spatial matching tasks was assessed every 15 minutes for eight hours. Significant 90- to 100-minute oscillations were observed for each task. It was also found that increases in performance on one task are accompanied by decreases on the other. (HM)

Comparing the effectiveness of four methods for training young children (4-4.5 years) in the skills of visual discrimination necessary to letter knowledge acquisition, this study indicates that training in oral description of critical cues of letters contributes to superior achievement in learning to match letters. (JC)

Describes the development of the capacity of encoding unfamiliar voices and compares this development with the development of the capacity for encoding faces. Subjects were 20 students from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and 20 children aged 6 to 16. (MP)

Four experiments studied effects of difficulty of word identification on optional conceptual processing by second, third, and fifth graders, and college students in a cued recall task. Results indicated that contrastive processing facilitates recall, and that difficulty of word identification may limit the extent of optional contrastive…

Preschoolers; second, fourth, and sixth graders; and university students were asked to interpret videotapes in which an actor conveyed contradictory verbal and facial expressions with and without a story context that provided a reason for the contradiction. Findings revealed age and context effects. (RH)

Notes that children are "wired" to learn, and cites research indicating the importance of talking to an infant for his or her neuron and subsequent cognitive development. Suggests reading aloud, providing positive feedback, responding verbally to the child's actions, and increasing vocabulary. (HTH)