Relational reasoning, or the ability to identify meaningful patterns within streams of information, has emerged as an important factor in a variety of complex tasks. One factor that has received relatively little research attention, however, is how relational reasoning may be influenced by the representational systems (i.e., verbal or nonverbal)…

A body of research shows that grammatical gender, although an arbitrary category, is viewed as the system with its own meaning. However, the question remains to what extent does grammatical gender influence shaping our notions about objects when both verbal and visual information are available. Two experiments were conducted. The results obtained…

Content analysis of the Columbia Mental Maturity Scale and the Test of Nonverbal Intelligence (TONI) revealed differences in the nature of perceptual and conceptual items. Both language-impaired and normal-language children performed significantly better on perceptual-type than conceptual-type items. The predominance of perceptual items was…

Infants ranging in age from six months to eight months were shown repeated instances of real object movement-disappearance-reappearance. Results suggest that the key changes in early cognitive development rest primarily upon the infant's gradual adaptation of old responses through encounters with new events--rather than upon the acquisition of…

The role of subject verbalization in the generalization of verbal-nonverbal correspondence was investigated in 12 kindergarten children who underwent either correspondence training (subject verbalization) or performing a behavior verbalized by the experimenter. Pupils who received correspondence training demonstrated greater generalization.…

Ten language impaired and 10 language normal children, aged 3-5), were asked to solve verbal and nonverbal problems requiring color and size judgments. There were no group differences on the verbal tasks, but the language impaired children performed less well on the nonverbal tasks especially on problems dealing with size. (Author/DB)

The role of imagery is assessed in verbal concept identification and evidence is found that some concepts can be coded as images. (Author/AM)

A series of exploratory studies and three experiments dealing with conceptual rule learning are reported in this paper. Discussants related the results to subject matter fields and to educational research and development. Four groups of subjects, five to twelve years old, solved six rule learning problems. It was concluded that younger children…

A study was conducted to determine whether language provided for the child in discriminating specific criteria helps him significantly to learn to create and hold criteria for sorting, a major difference in the theories of Vygotsky and Piaget. Specifically three questions are investigated: (1) whether 3- to 5-year-old black ghetto children can be…

Children's use of the middle concept was assessed in two developmental studies. Experiment 1, with kindergarten through fifth-grade students, showed marked improvement in the mastery of the middle concept across elementary grades. In Experiment 2, discrimination pretraining with two nonoverlapping stimulus sets transferred to the novel test…

A study was undertaken at the West Virginia School for the Deaf to test the assumption that the modes of thought of deaf children could be improved, and that improvement in concept formation would result in improvement in testable areas. Sixteen primary school children of approximately equal ability were selected and paired to form the control and…

A SEQUENCE OF LEARNING TASKS WHICH USED NONVERBAL STIMULI TO INTRODUCE CONCEPTS OF VECTOR SPACES WAS CONSTRUCTED. THE SAMPLE WAS 20 CHILDREN FROM GRADES 5 AND 6 WHO WERE MATCHED ON THE BASES OF INTELLIGENCE, READING, AND ARITHMETIC ACHIEVEMENT. EACH STAGE OF THE PROGRAMED SEQUENCE WAS PRESENTED TO EACH SUBJECT AS A CONCEPT-FORMATION PROBLEM.…

The research experiments on relational learning in young children contained in this report were guided by two major goals: (1) to examine the extent of conceptual transfer in preschool children, and (2) to explore the relation of both "acquisition" and "transfer" to chronological development. The performance of preschool…

Elementary school (kindergarten through sixth grade) deaf children were exposed to varied thinking activities based on J. Piaget's principle of action rooted intelligence to determine if thinking might be successfully encouraged in the classroom through activities which were not highly dependent on verbal performance. Each class of approximately…

Brain research indicates that sensory-motor experiences during childrens' preschool and early school years may be the foundation for later language development. (MLF)