An attempt to describe "what is known today about the description of the talking and listening process," which concludes that "much of language can be a) considered as a motor-skill, and b) seen to be susceptible of motor-control." (Author/LS)

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

Two experiments were conducted to evaluate the relative efficiency of verbal and visual adjunct aids for concrete and abstract prose learning. For the abstract passage, verbal aids worked best and visual aids were somewhat disruptive. The concrete passage did not demonstrate the equivalency for two types of aids. (Author/PN)

Older individuals have been reported to use imagery mediation less in remembering verbal material. To determine whether this is due to decrease in the speed with which verbal stimuli are recoded into pictorial representations, the reaction time of 12 old (63-78) and 12 young (17-25) subjects for matching verbal descriptions to geometric shapes was…

The effects of vocalized tests on paired-associate learning were compared with those of silent tests and of blank trials by using six conditions, each repeating a pattern of six cycles including one study trial. (Editor/RK)

Study used two experiments to examine the development of children's comprehension of the use of intonation and belief verbs to mark the relative certainty with which a speaker makes a statement. It is argued that children's understanding of prosody will be best revealed in contexts in which they are required to respond to the pragmatic function of…

The performance of 53 younger adults (mean age 20.7) and 52 older adults (mean age 68.3) was compared in a memory task involving pictures, words, and pictures-plus-words. Results showed (1) significantly higher recall scores for younger adults; (2) equivalent picture superiority effect for both groups; and (3) decline in older adults' performance…

Children performed well on tasks involving pictures regardless of whether the pictures were named. Performance on atypical pictures was better when category labels were provided than when labels were not provided. A control study demonstrated that children ignored labels when they named a transient, as opposed to a stable, category. (RH)

Compared the relationship between psychosocial environmental factors and toddlers' adaptive behavior in Egypt. Consistent with studies done in Western cultures, it was found that caregiver vocal stimulation was positively related to indices of toddler behavioral competence, whereas nonverbal response to vocalization and physical contact…

Examines relationship between results on Attitudes toward Women Scale and free response listing of thoughts in measuring 79 male, 81 female college students' attitudes about women's roles and issues. Both sexes responded more traditionally to Equal Rights Amendment and working mothers and less traditionally to shared household tasks, suggesting…

Mand functions for two stimuli (A1 and A2) were trained for 3 children with autism and were then incorporated into two related conditional discriminations (A1-B1/A2 -B2 and B1-C1/B2-C2). Tests were conducted to probe for a derived transfer of mand response functions from Al and A2 to C1 and C2, respectively. When 1 participant failed to…

The aim of the present research was to determine whether the effect that phonological similarity has on immediate serial recall is influenced by the consistency and position of phonemes within words. In comparison to phonologically dissimilar lists, when the stimulus lists rhyme there is a facilitative effect on the recall of item information and…

Backward inhibition is proposed as a process of lateral inhibition that operates during response selection in task switching, reducing interference caused by the most recently abandoned task set. The effect has been observed across a wide range of contexts but is eliminated by using spatial location to cue tasks (K. D. Arbuthnott & T. S. Woodward,…

Although the verbal operants that comprise Skinner's account of verbal behavior provide a seemingly complete description of the behavior of the speaker with respect to what is ordinarily called the expression of meanings, it may be shown that the account is intrinsically deficient in describing the receptive behavior of listeners with regard to…