This study examined the process of communication within the professional-family relationship by identifying and describing the types and patterns of talk during interactions between 15 families of young children with developmental delays and their respective early interventionists. Videotaped interactions of routine home visits were coded using a…

Non-word repetition, in which participants hear and repeat unfamiliar verbal stimuli, is thought to provide a particularly sensitive measure of verbal short-term memory capacity. However, performance on this task can also be constrained by hearing and speech production skills, and by an individuals' linguistic knowledge. This study examined real…

This study measured the differential effects of simplified and typical verbal antecedents on acquisition of picture discriminations for four preschool children with autism. During baseline probes, participants emitted no correct selection responses to pictures of common stimuli during either simplified or typical verbal antecedent conditions.…

We examined some conditions under which a response acquired as a tact might facilitate the establishment of a mand. We taught 3 participants with developmental disabilities to tact the items ranked highest and lowest in a preference assessment and subsequently tested to see if the responses occurred as mands. All participants manded for the highly…

Reports an experiment in which 80 male and female six and eight year olds were presented with pictures consistent or inconsistent with sex stereotypes and pictures of neutral activities. Later, subjects performed a picture-recognition task. Among the variables investigated were subjects' labeling of pictures and sex-stereotype consistency. (CB)

Undergraduate students completed a regular class test of 35 multiple-choice items, interspersed with five humorous verbal items written in multiple-choice format or selected syndicated cartoons. A questionnaire revealed that, although student perceptions of test humor were positive, they were less positive about verbal items. (Author/CM)

Researchers used simultaneous feedback, a means of modifying behavior through verbal cues transmitted via a transistorized ear plug, to improve the teaching skills of university faculty engaged in the act of teaching. Faculty identified areas they wished to improve after viewing videotapes of their teaching. (Authors/PP)

Discusses the possibility that early linguistic experience affects infant speech perception and that this effect may be of practical consequence in later language learning. (EKN)

Examines within an experimental paradigm phonological selection and avoidance patterns of infants and discusses the role of these patterns in early lexical acquisition. (EKN)

Reports on research that (1) suggests that phonetically ambiguous pairs (ice cream/I scream) have been used inaccurately to illustrate contextual effects in word segmentation, (2) supports unitary rather than exhaustive processing, and (3) supports the use of the concepts of word frequency and listener expectations instead of top-down, multiple…

Four experiments were carried out to examine the different recall strategies employed in a diagnostic test of visual sequential memory. The principal implication of the results is that good and poor readers may not differ with respect to visual memory but in their ability to employ a verbal labeling strategy. (Author/KC)

Receiver difference indices were developed to describe comprehension of organized and disorganized spoken messages. Comprehension was measured by a multiple-choice test and data analyses allowed for the interpretation of different indices of receiver comprehension in a variety of messages conditions. (Author/MH)

The effect of blocking of stimulus items on the free recall of educable mentally retarded adolescents was examined. (Author)

Examines infants' sensitivity to word units in fluent speech by inserting one-second pauses either at boundaries between successive words or between syllables within words. Results indicate that, by 11 months, infants are sensitive to word boundaries, and that this sensitivity depends on more than prosodic information or prior knowledge. (65…

Twelve learning-disabled (LD) children (ages 9-11) with language impairments performed more poorly on 3 verbal metaphor tasks and a visual metaphor task than 12 LD children without language impairments, who, in turn, performed more poorly than 12 nondisabled children on all but the visual task. Context variations had no effect on performance.…