Two experiments, involving 90 first-grade children, were conducted to test a retrieval-inefficiency explanation for the failure of visual imagery to facilitate young children's prose recall. (Author/MP)

Investigated how verb causality in question formulation affects the locus of causal origin for answers. Hypothesized questions formulated with action verbs cue the logical subject of the question sentence as the causal origin for answers. Reverse tendency was expected for state verbs. Verb type in question formulation was found to affect…

Presents a framework to help direct future research on pedagogical content knowledge in motor skill instruction, providing examples of the types of pedagogical content knowledge collected from experienced teachers and coaches during interviews and teaching observations. The framework comprises two interactive components--information processes and…

Forty-two inner city intermediate-grade learning-disabled students wrote fables when provided with the following stimuli: story starter, story ending with story content, and story ending with rhetorical purpose. The story ending groups did more story development planning than the story starter group, but composition quality was not significantly…

This study of 36 backward readers (mean age=111 months) from the Netherlands determined that repeated reading-while-listening of the same text did not lead to better results (except in reading speed) than reading different texts, and asking readers to detect mismatches between written and spoken texts did not improve performance. (Author/JDD)

Compares activities related to maternal organization of infant attention toward mother and the environment in Japanese and American mother-child dyads. Results reveal that the two cultures have both similar activity and interaction patterns and culture-specific patterns. (Author/BB)

Two experiments tracked infants' eye movements to examine use of word-initial information to understand fluent speech. Results indicated that 21- and 18-month-olds recognized partial words as quickly and reliably as whole words. Infants' productive vocabulary and reaction time were related to word recognition accuracy. Results show that…

Fifth-grade learning disabled and skilled readers (N=32) were compared on verbal dichotic listening tasks for free recall and cued recall of word lists organized by semantic, phonemic, and structural features. Results indicated that disabled readers were comparable on free recall but were inferior to skilled readers on cued recall. (Author/JW)

Twelve learning-handicapped elementary students were exposed to synthetic speech. Subsequently, the children identified a higher percentage of stimulus words presented by a speech synthesizer than did children in a limited exposure group. Both groups correctly identified more words presented by a tape recording than presented by the speech…

This study examined the effect of increasing the frequency of positive self-referent verbal statements upon both overt and reported self-esteem in children with adjustment problems. Subjects were boys in special schools. Results showed a significant difference in overt self-esteem, but not in other dependent variables. (LMO)

Reports two experiments showing a possible developmental shift from memory organization based on associative criteria to an organization based on categorical criteria. Children in first, fourth, and seventh grades were given a sort/recall task with items that could be organized into groups of categorical or associative pairs. (Author/CB)

The value of verbal labeling is shown by a study of fourth-grade, eighth-grade, and college students who were shown pictures accompanied by short verbal descriptions. Verbal descriptions increased correct recognitions and rejections of unrelated distractors, while increasing false recognition of related distractors. Results were consistent for all…

The influence of verbal and written labels on selective attention to visual materials was examined with retarded children. Under treatment conditions, retarded and normal children located an object more quickly, looked at it longer, and recognized more objects on a recognition-memory task. These results may be applied to materials development.…

The effects of semantic (S), orthographic (O), and unrelated (U) verbal stimuli on word retrieval were examined. S stimuli inhibited locating items within categories, whereas U stimuli inhibited locating the appropriate category. The discrepancy between the present outcome and the previous finding of S prime retrieval facilitation is discussed.…

Investigated verbal and nonverbal paired associate learning among 8- to 11-year-old Dutch dyslexic children and chronological-age and reading-age controls. Found that dyslexic children had difficulty with verbal learning of words and nonwords. Phonological and general learning errors were distributed similarly for the reading groups. Found no…