Two mentally retarded boys with autism and one girl with Down syndrome were successfully taught to initiate and play a ball game with an adult. The program targeted both nonverbal responses (such as ball contact and cooperative play) and verbal responses for play initiation and compliment delivery. (Author/JDD)

An auditory inspection time (AIT) test, pitch discrimination tests, and verbal and non-verbal mental ability tests were administered to 59 undergraduates and 119 12-year-old school children. Results indicate that AIT correlations with intelligence are due to AIT being an index of information intake speeds. (TJH)

Twenty children, aged six-eight, with normal nonverbal intelligence but language comprehension deficits, were administered tasks of verbal and perceptual proportional analogical reasoning and a problem-solving task of functional analogical reasoning. Compared to controls, subjects were deficient in analogical reasoning. However, when the…

Elementary children (n=112) comprising average IQ, high IQ, dyslexic, and normal readers were administered measures of planning, attention-arousal, simultaneous and successive processing, phonemic segmentation, and nonverbal IQ. Cognitive tasks differentiating dyslexic from normal readers were the successive processing tasks and two tasks of…

Self-concept ratings of children with mathematics disabilities (MD), average mathematics achievement (AA), and high mathematics achievement (HA) who attended regular classes in grades 4 through 6 were compared. Twenty-four children in each group, who were selected from an original pool of 811 children, and who were matched one-to-one by grade,…

This article reports the results of an exploratory survey of 32 families of children with septo-optic dysplasia and 32 families of children without visual impairment or any specific health problems (who served as a comparison group). The focus of the research was to explore the children's musical interests and abilities, the musical provision that…

The assessment of hearing impaired children is fraught with a number of problems. These include lack of valid assessment measures, faulty theoretical assumptions, lack of knowledge regarding the functioning of cognitive processes of these children, and biases against these children. This article briefly considers these issues and describes a study…

The current research compared two accounts of the relation between language and false belief in children, namely that (a) language is generally related to false belief because both require secondary representation in a social-interactional context and that (b) specific language structures that explicitly code meta representation contribute…

Condensed from "The Potential of Vocational Education: Observations and Conclusions, Institute for Research on Human Resources, The Pennsylvania State University.

Aspects of children's early representational drawing ability may provide evidence for feature marking in non-linguistic symbol systems. To test this assumption children in kindergarten, second, and fourth grade were asked to draw a set of referent objects in three conditions: a nominal or standard condition with no implied relationship ("two…

Examined the relationships among two psychometric measures of nonverbal cognitive ability - The Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised (WISC-R) and the Woodcock-Johnson Psychoeducational Battery-Tests of Cognitive Ability (WJPB-TCA) and a neuropsychological test of abstract reasoning and concept formation (Halstead Category Test) in 25…

This study examined the relationship between academic domain specific self-concept (specifically mathematical and verbal) and the academic achievement in mathematics and English of young adolescents. Middle school students in grades seven and eight ranging in age from 12 to 15 years completed three subscales of the Self-Description…

This longitudinal study examined the hypothesis that two different types of joint-attention skills were related to verbal and nonverbal IQ measures through middle childhood. Subjects were infants born preterm and tested at 13 months and at 8 years. Findings provide support for the hypothesis that the initiation of joint attention makes a unique…

Discusses a longitudinal case study of the literacy levels and styles of thinking of a group of males disabled in print acquisition. Finds that subjects rapidly perceived a whole gestalt, executed with an economy of language, and retained strengths in visuospatial, nonverbal processing, while losing verbal language abilities. (RS)

Findings from observations of 64 8- and 9-year olds show that the use of exploratory talk, talking in which joint reasoning is made explicit, can improve group reasoning and that this exploratory talk can be taught and can transfer between educational contexts. Teaching exploratory talk also improved results on a nonverbal reasoning test. (SLD)