Discussed is the language impairment of children with infantile autism. The speech patterns of autistic children, including echolalia, pronomial reversal, silent language, and voice imitation, are described. The clinical picture of the autistic child is compared to that of children with such other disorders as deafness, retardation, and…

Three groups of 20 subjects received two exposures of a list of ten sentences followed by an immediate written recall test. The sentences varied in syntactic complexity from group to group, but the sentences for the three groups were similar in semantic content. The effect of sentence complexity upon recall performance was not found to be…

This document comprises two studies. In the first, 108 undergraduates were assigned to nine groups of 12 subjects each in a 3 x 3 factorial design. One factor was prompt word (subject noun, main verb, or object noun) and the other was sentence type (active, passive, or relative. Sentence type was included in the study in order to vary the position…

The game "Giant Steps" was described. It was designed to aid children in the semantic development of verbs. The purpose of the experimental evaluation was to determine whether playing the game actually did influence the associative structure of those verbs and adverbs that are "guessed" words in the game. Third graders from two classrooms in an…

Sixty college subjects were administered low frequency verbal discrimination lists under the conditions of pronouncing versus button pressing as a method of choice. There were sixteen word pairs in each list, and the words were three- and four-letter low frequency words selected from the Thorndike-Lorge tables. Four random orders of the pairs were…

Information theory was used to qualify the difficulty of verbal discrimination (VD) learning tasks and to measure VD performance. Words for VD items were selected with high background frequency and equal a priori probabilities of being selected as a first response. Three VD lists containing only 2-, 3-, or 4-word items were created and equated for…

This study attempts to determine if the stimulus generalization concept is applicable to school-relevant instruction when the material to be learned is verbal science information. The delivery techniques under investigation were audio, printed, and a simultaneous combination of both media. Three hundred and thirteen tenth grade biology students…

Experiments are described in which students listened to messages describing the placements of numbers in imaginable matrices. Recall was tested by having students write in the correct cells of a blank matrix. Results appear consistent with a modified level of processing approach. (Author/RM)

This study involving 38 normally achieving fourth and fifth grade children confirmed previous studies indicating that both spatial-simultaneous (in which perceived stimuli are totally available at one point in time) and verbal-successive (information is presented in serial order) cognitive processing are important in normal learning. (DB)

Compared the relative performance of 40 patients with a history of alcohol abuse on tasks of short-term semantic and visual memory. Performance on the visual memory tasks was impaired significantly relative to the semantic memory task in a within-subjects analysis of variance. Semantic memory was unimpaired. (Author/ABB)

Verbal self instruction (VSIT) has potential for training persons with an intellectual disability in the use of strategies, particularly in promoting generalization of behavior. Among technical issues discussed are providing appropriate initial training procedures and identifying differential task effects. Problems with range of application, goal…

The components of the language-based approach to intervention with hearing impaired children which emphasizes the importance of conversational interaction in the preschool years are described. Implications for caregivers are noted. (CL)

Generalization of four retarded children's (five to eight years old) object naming responses to stimuli in the natural environment was assessed after training with either objects or pictures. Generalization was typically greater after training with objects. In a second experiment, an alternating procedure resulted in substantial increases in…

In two experiments, differences were investigated between 21 gifted youths and comparison groups on paired-associate tasks involving meaningful and nonmeaningful words, reported use of spontaneously produced learning strategies, and degree to which learning strategies facilitated recall. Gifted youths outperformed age peers in recall and strategy…

A learning disability index (LDI) based on a principal components analysis of the Weschler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised normative data has been developed to depict verbal or nonverbal deficits on that test. Ss (N=1550) referred for educational difficulties returned mean scores on the LDI that were reliably different from expected scores…