Mobile devices have been increasingly utilized in informal learning because of their high degree of portability; mobile guide systems (or electronic guidebooks) have also been adopted in museum learning, including those that combine learning strategies and the general audio-visual guide systems. To gain a deeper understanding of the features and…

Drawing upon the philosophical and technical frameworks of discourse analysis, this paper suggests the rules governing linguistic choices in constructing negotiation. First, it clarifies the philosophical assumptions underlying different approaches to analysis, specifying a conceptual focus, particularly with regard to the situation and the…

The verbal and nonverbal behaviors of five children (ages seven and eight) with specific language impairments wishing to gain access into established social interactions were evaluated. Although comparative children without language impairments had no difficulty, three of the subjects were unable to gain access at all and the other two did so…

This study, involving 40 young siblings of either handicapped or nonhandicapped children, found that siblings of handicapped children engaged in more parallel and social play and were more nurturing with their siblings than were control children. Mothers were more likely to deliver commands, directives, and reprimands to siblings of handicapped…

Many people hold negative attitudes toward older adults, and these attitudes often are associated with negative behavior toward the old. To explore the behavioral correlates of attitudes toward the elderly, 105 male and female college students, with a mean age of 24.5 years, participated in a two-phase experiment. During phase one, all subjects…

Research has suggested that people not sharing a common fate lack a sense of group identity, thus decreasing the tendency for helping behavior. To study the effects of stress and commonality of fate on helping behavior, 60 female college students participated in a replication of an earlier study which used male subjects. Participants were assigned…

Ethnographic techniques were applied to a post hoc examination of children's incidental behaviors during a metalinguistic intervention procedure--behaviors ignored in the original experimental design. The reflective and qualitative nature of ethnography was used to account for the 12 phonologically impaired 4-year-olds' varied perceptions of…

The Infant Parent Social Interaction Code was developed to measure infant-parent interaction utilizing four parent variables, four infant variables, and one dyadic variable for which operational definitions were developed. Preliminary and validation studies with a total of 232 infants and toddlers suggest the measure reveals important interactive…

To explore the impact of the environment on perceptions of compliance gaining situations, 97 university students were asked to recall and describe situations in which they had had to persuade someone to do something. Their descriptions of compliance gaining situations were then evaluated for similarity by three additional groups of students. The…

The quality of life of nursing home residents may be enhanced by providing them with opportunities to participate in social activities involving different age groups and community-dwelling age peers. To obtain descriptive data, and to investigate the relationships between patterns of social interaction and subject characteristics, time-sampled…

The continuing inability of measures of personality to predict communicative or other types of behaviors has forced researchers to seek alternative ways of measuring. One alternative consists of a measure of four types of causal attribution in hypothetically crucial situations in five types of relationships of humans. The type of relationship in…

Evaluation of 26 children (ages 24-55 months) with pervasive developmental disorder (PDD) while interacting with either the mother, a familiar female teacher, and an unfamiliar male doctor. PDD subjects were most severely impaired during the mother episode. During the teacher episode, PDD subjects were twice as variable in interpersonal response…