Social facilitation as a self-presentational display, and social performance impairment attributable to perceived public failure, are examined in a study of context effects in verbal learning. Female undergraduates (N=72) served as subjects with one male who served as an "audience." Performance data indicate that, consistent with the present…

The effect on concept learning of requiring the memorization of either examples or nonexamples prior to going through a theoretically effective training program was compared to the performance of groups of seventh and eighth graders who either memorized nothing or memorized subconcepts of the concept definition. Correct classification scores and…

Three experiments examined the relation between language acquisition and other symbolic abilities in 18- and 26-month old infants. Infants' ability to learn either words or symbolic gestures as names for object categories were compared across age groups. Findings indicated that infants at both ages learned novel words as symbols for object…

Third and fourth grade students were administered a learning strategy screening in an attempt to determine: (1) their ability to describe individual learning strategies used to remember presented words, (2) the classifiability of student learning strategy descriptions as primarily visual or verbal, (3) the feasibility of using multiple student…

The data from verbal learning studies have been partially instrumental in the development of the theory of extraversion-introversion (E-I) relative to levels of cortical arousal. In most of the studies relating E-I to verbal learning, the approach was to determine if there was an overall superiority for one of the personality groups. Differences…

Composition researchers and teachers grant that the relationship of non-verbal thinking and language plays a crucial role in the writing of fiction and poetry, but they are sometimes reluctant to perceive that non-verbal thinking must, necessarily, be crucial, with different emphases, in the thinking/writing processes of rhetoric. Activities and…

This study investigated the use readers make of visual and verbal illustration to understand and remember what they have read. Specific focus was placed on readers' use of pictures and analogies to understand and remember written directions for a spatial manipulation task. The independent variables measured were type of text, mode of illustration,…

This study tested the following hypotheses: (1) that children would use both verbal-associative and acoustic memory attributes when encoding words in memory, and that the recall of younger children would indicate dominance of the acoustic attribute while the recall of older children would indicate dominance of the verbal-associative attribute; (2)…

Analyzes attributes of symbols and identifies the need for a suitable management system for retrieving images from a database. A classification structure that incorporates graphic, semantic, and bibliographic dimensions is described; experiments with describing, sorting, and drawing symbols are reviewed; and future work on a database management…

Designed to help students observe and learn about how they individually represent experience and assign meaning, the exercises in this paper are intended for use in courses on intrapersonal communication or in course units on cognitive aspects of communication. The journal exercise is described in terms of its goals, approaches to it, and includes…

A study examined how preschool children use information about linguistic contrast in learning new words. The 72 subjects were assigned to four groups to play a game. They were asked to get an unfamiliar item, one of nine swatches of different colors, shapes, and materials. In the first group, the children were told only one label (color, shape, or…

A battery of immediate memory tests was given to eight mentally retarded Down's Syndrome Ss, eight controls matched on chronological age (CA), and eight controls matched on mental age (MA). All Ss were required to identify both receptively and expressively 24 items from the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test. There was no significant difference…

Preschoolers' ability to utilize language in spatial problem solving was tested with 64 predominately middle-class children. The number of correct responses was analyzed using an age/sex/medium analysis of variance. It was found that the verbal response mode leads to substantially more correct responses than do pictures and that girls performed…

In this study, kindergarten children classified as impulsive received (1) visual analysis training involving either motor or verbal responses, (2) were trained only to delay their responses, or (3) were assinged to a control group receiving no training. While all treatment groups showed a significant decrease in errors on the Matching Familiar…

The effects of five verbal elaboration conditions on the paired associate learning of 50 elementary-aged educable mentally retarded children were investigated. Four of the conditions, crossing functional and positional relations in familiar or unfamiliar events, were included in a two-factor design (type of relation x familiarity); the fifth…