Three studies involving eight trainable mentally retarded students (11-16 years old) were interpreted as illustrating the ways in which variables influence stimulus overselectivity and the mechanisms that contribute to the obtained training effects. (CL)

Exclusion of stimuli involved in complex stimulus relations was examined in a severely retarded young man. The study systematically replicated and extended research on exclusion performance of low-functioning mentally retarded individuals and provided additional data on relational learning in this population. (Author/CL)

Programs were designed to teach three severely retarded adolescents to use individual anagram letters to construct the appropriate color words when shown color patches. After learning visual equivalences between colors and printed words, Ss demonstrated auditory reading-comprehension (matching printed words to dictated words) and oral reading…

Two studies on stimulus overselectivity among three and four severely retarded adolescent males suggested that overselective responding occurs within a match-to-sample paradigm; its degree is influenced by delay intervals; it may be a failure to discriminate low preference dimensions of a multiple cue stimulus within specified situations; and it…

Four developmentally disordered, speech deficient children (11-16 years old), who were being taught sign language as an alternative to speech, were taught to use manual signs as mediators in a delayed auditory-picture matching-to-sample task. (Author/CL)

Ten author-contributed papers present information on stimulus control research and developmental disabilities. Articles address such isues as the role of naming, development of stimulus classes, control by exclusion, and comparison of trial-and-error and graduated stimulus change procedures. (CL)

Three autistic boys (ages 9-13) were trained to select a card containing a stimulus array comprised of three visual cues. Decreased distance between cues resulted in responses to more cues, increased distance to fewer cues. Distances did not affect the responding of children matched for mental and chronological age. (Author/JW)

Three adolescents with moderate to severe mental retardation were taught to use picture prompts to guide their performance on two vocational sequencing tasks. All students completed the training task with at least 96% accuracy with the picture prompts, and generalized their performance with equal accuracy to the untrained task. (Author/CL)

Two experiments were performed with five severely developmentally disabled individuals (13-26 years old) to test the relationship between toys as conditioned reinforcers and stereotypy. Findings suggested that conditioning reinforcers for play, such as toys, may result in a durable and possibly more cost effective procedure of dealing with…

Four studies compared static versus dynamic presentations of examples and nonexaples of the concepts "diagonal" and "conves," with nonhandicapped preschoolers, mildly handicapped primary students, and severely handicapped adults. Ss taught with a dynamic presentation learned the discrimination in significantly fewer trials, with performance either…

To explore training with multiple exemplars, six severely retarded students (ages 5-21) were taught signed labels for categories of natural objects using either three or five good examples. The arithmetic difference between the two conditions indicated higher levels of generalization following training with five examples for five of the six…