Children aged 6 to 13 years were given verbal and nonverbal fluency tasks and block design subtests of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised. Results, providing normative data, showed that fluency tasks are age-, but not sex-dependent, and are modestly correlated to one another. (Author/CM)

Two visual search experiments suggest that: cerebral lateralization of cognitive functions results from differences in sensorimotor resolution capacities of the hemispheres; both hemispheres can process verbal and visuospatial information analytically and holistically; and respective hemispheric competence is a function of the level of…

Human performance on verbal and spatial matching tasks was assessed every 15 minutes for eight hours. Significant 90- to 100-minute oscillations were observed for each task. It was also found that increases in performance on one task are accompanied by decreases on the other. (HM)

Comparing the effectiveness of four methods for training young children (4-4.5 years) in the skills of visual discrimination necessary to letter knowledge acquisition, this study indicates that training in oral description of critical cues of letters contributes to superior achievement in learning to match letters. (JC)

Describes the development of the capacity of encoding unfamiliar voices and compares this development with the development of the capacity for encoding faces. Subjects were 20 students from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and 20 children aged 6 to 16. (MP)

Investigates the prediction that the usual superiority of pictures over words for repetitions of the same items would disappear for items that were different instances of repeated categories. (Author/RK)

Four experiments studied effects of difficulty of word identification on optional conceptual processing by second, third, and fifth graders, and college students in a cued recall task. Results indicated that contrastive processing facilitates recall, and that difficulty of word identification may limit the extent of optional contrastive…

Preschoolers; second, fourth, and sixth graders; and university students were asked to interpret videotapes in which an actor conveyed contradictory verbal and facial expressions with and without a story context that provided a reason for the contradiction. Findings revealed age and context effects. (RH)

Notes that children are "wired" to learn, and cites research indicating the importance of talking to an infant for his or her neuron and subsequent cognitive development. Suggests reading aloud, providing positive feedback, responding verbally to the child's actions, and increasing vocabulary. (HTH)

We examined the role of specific therapist verbal behaviors in predicting successful completion of Parent?Child Interaction Therapy (PCIT) in 22 families, including 11 families that successfully completed treatment and 11 that discontinued treatment prematurely. The children were 3 to 6 years old and diagnosed with oppositional defiant disorder…

We report the case of a neonate tested three weeks after a neonatal left sylvian infarct. We studied her perception of speech and non-speech stimuli with high-density event-related potentials. The results show that she was able to discriminate not only a change of timbre in tones but also a vowel change, and even a place of articulation contrast…

The interaction between prosodic and segmental aspects of infant representations for speech was explored using the head-turn paradigm, with untrained everyday familiar words and phrases as stimuli. At 11 months English-learning infants, like French infants (Halle & Boysson-Bardies, 1994), attended significantly longer to a list of familiar lexical…

A novel attentional capture effect is reported in which visual-verbal serial recall was disrupted if a single deviation in the interstimulus interval occurred within otherwise regularly presented task-irrelevant spoken items. The degree of disruption was the same whether the temporal deviant was embedded in a sequence made up of a repeating item…

We tested the effects of multiple exemplar instruction (MEI) on the emergence of untaught mands or tacts of adjective-object pairs in a multiple-probe design across four students with autism/developmental disabilities. None of the students emitted either mands or tacts for three sets of three adjective-object pairs (word sets counterbalanced…

Two studies were conducted to train students to use imagery in their learning and to investigate whether such training would transfer to solving visual puzzles and verbal problems. In the first study, with 78 graduate students, 29 experimental-group subjects were given a lecture and slide presentation designed to teach about imagery. Both the…