Purpose: Listening is the gateway to learning in the mainstream classroom; however, classrooms are noisy environments, making listening challenging. Therefore, speech-in-noise tests that realistically incorporate the complexity of the classroom listening environment are needed. The aim of this article was to review the speech stimuli, noise…

Habituation of looking time has become the standard method for studying cognitive processes in infancy. This method has a long history and derives from the study of memory and habituation itself. Often, however, it is not clear how researchers make decisions about how to implement habituation as a tool to study processes such as categorization,…

One issue of interest to practitioners and researchers in science centres concerns what meanings visitors are making from their interactions with exhibits and how they make sense of these experiences. The research reported in this study is an exploratory attempt, therefore, to investigate this process by using video clips and still photographs of…

This paper summarizes the results of a review of the empirical literature (1990-2005) focusing on use of assistive technology as a self-management tool for persons with intellectual disabilities. Forty investigations were identified which provided information on assistive technology to assist persons with disabilities to initiate and complete…

Proportion compatible manipulations are often used to index strategic processes in selective attention tasks. Here, a subtle confound in proportion compatible manipulations is considered. Specifically, as the proportion of compatible trials increases, the ratio of complete repetitions and complete alternations to partial repetitions increases on…

In psychological research, one often aims at explaining individual differences in S-R profiles, that is, individual differences in the responses (R) with which people react to specific stimuli (S). To this end, researchers often postulate an underlying sequential process, which boils down to the specification of a set of mediating variables (M)…

Fifty years after the publication of Skinner's "Verbal Behavior", some possibilities for the future of Skinner's "science of verbal behavior" are considered. Specifically, certain areas of development or advancement are examined which might be of special importance to the expansion and influence of the functional analysis of verbal behavior.…

There have been multiple reports over the last 3 decades that stimulus quality and word frequency have additive effects on the time to make a lexical decision. However, it is surprising that there is only 1 published report to date that has investigated the joint effects of these two factors in the context of reading aloud, and the outcome of that…

Investigates the effect of target size and presence, intensity, and location of sound on the visual following of infants one and two months of age. (Author/RH)

This study compared three methods of stimulus preference assessment for four verbal children (ages six to nine) with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, specifically evaluating the utility of a verbal choice procedure for assessing relative reinforcer value. Verbal and pictorial stimulus-choice assessments identified high- and low-preference…

Discrepancy between angl head turn and loudspeaker location was measured on infants in auditory-alone and auditory-visual trials. Age and loudspeaker location had no effect on performance in auditory-visual trials. However, in auditory-alone trials, there were significant age differences. (PCB)

Seven-month-old infants looked at pairs of slides of two and three objects while listening to either two or three drum beats. Study data call into question the suggestion that the influence of auditory information on infants' attentiveness to a visually presented numerical event is mediated by cross-modal matching of numerical information.…

In a classification task, preschoolers matched a target stimulus with a conventional category, a visually similar item that cut across conventional categories, or an unrelated item. Items were presented in picture, verbal, and picture-verbal conditions. In all conditions, conventional classifications outnumbered visual ones, and this difference…

Demonstrates young children's shift toward a taxonomic basis for organization of both named and depicted objects. Concludes that perceptual organization in young children cannot be attributed to an inability to ignore visual information but seems to be based upon the centrality of perceptual features to the representation of objects. (Author/NH)

Three experiments tested for developmental changes in attention to auditory and visual signals. Results showed that adults and seven-year-olds tended to allocate their attention to vision rather than audition when no precue was provided. While not entirely consistent, results with four-year-olds suggested a similar biasing of attention to vision.…