This bridge study evaluated the effects of contingency-specifying instructions (CSIs) and incomplete instructions (IIs) in terms of establishing instructional control of appropriate behavior. Results suggested that instructional control and maintenance were achieved with CSIs but not with IIs. Results are discussed in terms of the potential use of…

This study examined the feasibility of one method of investigating the development of children's implicit awareness of syntactic patterns. An enriched version of the free association format was used to test 32 subjects. The principal variables of interest were the subject's grade level, and the syntactic pattern and meaningfulness of the semantic…

Partial pictures facilitated performance when presented with verbal information, but not when presented with the test questions. Sentence repetition facilitated performance only on questions presumed to reflect relatively shallow information processing. (Author/STS)

The main aim of this study was to compare children diagnosed as dysphonetic and dyseidetic on a number of mental processing variables to determine if opposite patterns of relative strength and weakness between the groups could be documented. Another aim was to externally validate the diagnostic criteria, which were based on standardized clinical…

Examines story retention after one-week interval as a function of topic familiarity and test-item relatedness. Second- and fifth-grade children participated. (MP)

This study measured retention (after 5 and 10 years) of verbal material recited by a parent during infancy at stages of pre- and postsyllable differentiation. (GO)

Children from kindergarten, second, and fifth grade were verbally presented a passage containing an equal number of idea units which were relevant versus irrelevant to the main theme of a story. For all grade levels, relevant idea units were recalled to a greater extent than idea units irrelevant to the main theme. (CS)

Two experiments on the translation of verbal expressions into mathematical expressions are described. The author concludes that the usual way of training students to solve arithmetic word problems is inadequate. (SD)

The study involving 20 retarded and 20 control children (all 10 to 13 years old) was conducted to determine the extent to which short-term memory of three-dimensional stimuli is dependent upon a verbal process for both normal and retarded children. (SBH)

In an absolute frequency judgment task, 130 sixth graders received either high-frequency (Hi-F), low-frequency, high-meaningfulness (Lo-F/Hi-M), or low-frequency, low-meaningfulness (Lo-F/Lo-M) words selected from the 1944 Thorndike-Lorge list. Subjects were asked to either pronounce the words aloud, listen to the examiner prounounce the written…

Examines the hypothesis that an attentional preference for an imitator is a function of the magnitude of reinforcement associated with that person, and measures response uncertainty, a construct considered important in the effectance arousal theory often used to explain "being imitated" effects. (Author/RH)

Twenty-eight L-dyslexic and 26 P-dyslexic children (mean age of 9-10) received hemisphere-specific stimulation (HSS) by presentation of words to right and left fingers, respectively. Relative to controls, HSS-treated L-dyslexic subjects showed larger improvement of accuracy in text reading, whereas HSS-treated P-dyslexic subjects showed more…

Males and females from grades 3, 6 and college viewed sets of five or seven letters in a 4x4 matrix and remembered either names of the letters, positions of the letters within the matrix or both letters and positions. At all grade levels females remembered letters better than positions, males did equally well on both. (MS)

In a study of second graders, results supported the hypothesis that recognition memory would be disrupted when children's attention control strategy required the same cognitive operations as the task material to be studied. (Author/MP)

Two studies were conducted with 8- and 10-year-old children to examine sources of age and skill differences in verbal analogical reasoning. Discussion focuses on the child's "problem space" for the analogy task and possible differences in task understanding that lead to strategy and process differences in older versus younger and skilled versus…