In two experiments subjects were required to determine whether a random, angular form, presented at any of a number of picture-plane orientations was a "standard" or "reflected" version. Average time required to make this determination increased linearly with the angular departure of the form from a previously learned orientation. (Author/BJG)

College freshmen who have poor educational backgrounds are found to be deficient in mathematics and often also lack skills in English. Their difficulty with basic mathematics is further aggravated by traditional teaching techniques that demand extensive reading ability and a thorough knowledge of English. At Morgan State College, a non-verbal…

Concomitant with a child's acquisition of phonological, syntactic, and semantic rules of an adult language is the need to learn pragmatic and contextual abilities for proper use of the language. As early language acquisition is closely allied with play, three children aged about 22 to 40 months were observed during play activities to determine…

In this study, representational thought, which involves the child's ability to function in terms of nonpresent reality, is viewed within a cognitive-developmental framework. To see if disadvantaged children would function in the same way as advantaged children on tasks which required representational thought rather than verbalization, children…

This paper summarizes data comparing the correlation patterns of psychometric, social, and demographic variables with intelligence quotient (IQ) and learning potential (LP) scores derived from the Kohs Block Designs and Raven Progressive Matrices procedures. The sample consists of educable mentally retarded special class and institutionalized…

Visual sequences should be the first visual literacy exercises for reasons that are physio-psychological, semantic, and curricular. In infancy, vision is undifferentiated and undetailed. The number of details a child sees increases with age. Therefore, a series of pictures, rather than one photograph which tells a whole story, is more appropriate…

A study was conducted to determine whether language provided for the child in discriminating specific criteria helps him significantly to learn to create and hold criteria for sorting, a major difference in the theories of Vygotsky and Piaget. Specifically three questions are investigated: (1) whether 3- to 5-year-old black ghetto children can be…

This study sought to ascertain how teachers and students interpret non-verbal cues in the form of visuo-gestural channel expressions by having them assign affective meaning to such expressions depicted photographically. Subjects were 377 students and 19 teachers from two elementary schools: one, urban and characterized as low socioeconomic status;…

This study was based on the following assumptions: (1) functioning of the brain's left hemisphere, because of its logical, verbal mode, facilitates conservation reasoning; (2) functioning of the brain's right hemisphere, because of its nonverbal, spatial mode, inhibits conservation reasoning; (3) visual input from the left eye will reach the left…

Reports three experiments with kindergartners and first graders which used one-trial multidimensional reasoning tasks like those of Toppino (Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, v30, p496-512, 1980). Feedback information and preliminary experience with simple forms of the task produced high performance levels, and verbal labeling in the…

Subjects were Zambian elementary school children, ages 7-17, providing evidence of weight conservation behavior and those who did not; principal dependent variable was performance on locally-developed psychometric measures of reasoning ability. Very little connection was found between the conservation-status of the subjects and their performance…

Authors suggest exercises for program beginning at first-grade level. (Editor)

Differing amounts and ordering of pictorial content were compared to determine their effect on learning word-referent relations in a second language. Findings indicated there is an optimal level at which nonverbal context facilitates the process of inferring word meanings in a foreign language. (Author/DS)

Illustrates how nonverbal elements, either inherent in the text or incorporated into the reading lesson, can be used to facilitate students' foreign language reading comprehension. Suggestions for using visual information strategies for prediction, overall comprehension, main points comprehension, and intensive comprehension help students to…