Verbal contextual information affected photography and nonphotography students' performance on semantic retention tests. For example, correct titles aided the formation and retention of accurate memories, while erroneous titles misled students into remembering meanings that had relatively little to do with what was actually pictured in the…

The relationship between sign and verbal learning was explored using 10 severely mentally retarded adults. They were taught color labels in sign, verbal, or sign and verbal groups. Sign labels tended to be learned more efficiently; combined sign and verbal training improved verbal learning but not sign learning. (Author/CM)

Reaction time to detect a phoneme target in a sentence was faster when the target-containing word formed part of the semantic focus of the sentence. Sentence understanding was facilitated by rapid identification of focused information. Active search for accented words can be interpreted as a search for semantic focus. (Author/RD)

Subjects named or categorized a picture preceded sometime earlier by itself or by its verbal label, as well as a word preceded by itself or a pictorial counterpart. Pictures clearly profited more when the task was naming, whereas words profited more when subjects performed a categorization task. (Author/GDC)

Two studies of toddlers and children with autism, mentally handicapped children, and normal toddlers examined whether autistic toddlers used Speaker's Direction of Gaze (SDG) strategy or less powerful Listener's Direction of Gaze (LDG) strategy to learn a word for a novel object. Results suggest autistic toddlers are insensitive to speaker's gaze…

Case study groups (n=106) were randomly assigned to face-to-face, chat, or group support systems conditions; half of each group received structural primers. Ditransitive structural frequency counts indicated that the primer significantly shifted learning style. Complexity was significantly greater in the group support system treatment. (14…

Findings provide tentative support for the hypothesis that strategy information derived from enactive interviews is more predictive of children's behavior in peer situations than is information derived from the verbal interview method. This suggests that preschool children automatically access cognitive scripts for behavior in social interactions.…

Examined were the influences of three conditions of predictability on word-recognition performance by 30 normally hearing listeners. Significant differences in word recognition were observed among high-predictability phrases, low-predictability phrases, and a constant predictability-neutral carrier phrase, using three specific signal-to-babble…

Examined relationships among working memory, memory span, and reading skills in children and adults. Found that working memory and short-term memory skills develop through adolescence, but working memory skills show declines in adulthood. Age-related declines in memory appear to be related to the task's processing demands, which may affect the…

Examined the possibility that auditory stimuli with properties of adult-to-infant speech are more detectable in a noisy ambient environment than ones that resemble adult-to-adult speech. Findings suggests that properties that characterize adult-to-infant speech may compensate for young infants' low-frequency deficits and therefore facilitate the…

Using police reports and court testimonies, examined women's resistance strategies to rape. Results indicated that 85 percent of the women who resisted with physical force were responding to the offender's initiated violence. Women reacting with physical aggression to violent attack were more likely to avoid rape than were nonresisting women. (RJM)

Tested a normally developing child several times between 16 and 27 months of age for his ability to derive the relations between stimuli. Found that the child derived "mutual entailment" relations and showed "nonverbal exclusion" as early as 17 months. "Combinatorial entailment" relations and "verbal…

Examines children's verbal responses to music listening by interviewing 33 children in kindergarten through fifth-grade. Explains that three judges categorized their responses. Indicates judge consensus over the form and content of responses; age tendencies resulted in 3 questions; similarities between development of verbal responses to music and…

Three adults with intellectual and visual disabilities were taught vocationally relevant tasks through the use of a self-operated verbal instruction system. Data showed that during the training all participants achieved percentages of correct task performance exceeding 90. Use of instructional clusters was effective in maintaining high levels of…

Around 5 or 6 years of age, children begin to recognize that speakers who make ironic remarks do not believe what they literally say, but children of the same age do not show appreciation for the humor function of irony (Dews et al., 1996; Harris & Pexman, 2003). We investigated 7- to 10-year-old children's interpretations of verbal irony and…