The play behavior of young children is viewed as a behavioral manifestation of nonverbal thinking. Discussed are issues of relevance to the understanding of the development of thought in general and of the symbolic function in particular. A line of development is proposed which leads from early nonverbal thought as manifested in play, either…

Introspective experiences that nine University of Tulsa (Oklahoma) faculty members (aged 29-52 years) have when acquiring cognitive skills without awareness were studied as they acquired nonconscious knowledge about a pattern of stimuli. Nonconsciously acquired knowledge was automatically used to facilitate performance, without conscious…

The study examined the correlations between academic achievement and scores on the Hiskey-Nebraska Test of Learning Aptitude, the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-Revised (WAIS-R) Performance Scale, with 35 deaf high school students. Results validated the use of the WAIS-R as a predictor of academic achievement for this population. (DB)

Nonretarded trainable retarded and mildly retarded individuals (N=106), matched on MA, attempted to identify emotional states of tape-recorded voices speaking in an unfamiliar language. Although analyses indicated that trainable subjects were less accurate overall than were mildly retarded and nonretarded subjects, all three groups were able to…

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…

Comparison of external memory strategies in 31 children (ages 11 and 17) with mild mental retardation and 64 children without mental retardation found no differences between children with mental retardation and their age peers in frequency of use of object-oriented strategies. For all groups, external strategies were used more frequently than…

Presents results of a test of nonmusic majors' ability to remember song titles. Suggests that, although the process of categorization seems to be a basic function of perception, appropriate categorization needs to be learned. Supports the view that music learning, like verbal learning, involves a categorization of stimuli based on holistic…

Impairment of hippocampal function precedes frontal and parietal cortex impairment in human Alzheimer's disease(AD). Neurotrophins are critical for behavioral performance and neuronal survival in AD. We used complex and radial mazes to assess spatial orientation and learning in wild-type and B6-Tg(ThylAPP)23Sdz (APP23) animals, a transgenic mouse…

Because differences among students in modes of thinking bear directly on teaching methods, the author presented some research that has been done on individual differences in thinking modalities and considered its relevance to teaching. (Author/RK)

The paper examines aspects of effective language intervention with autistic children. An overview is presented about the nature of language, its perception and comprehension, and the production of speech-language. Assessment strategies are considered. The second part of the paper analyzes traditional and communications-based intervention programs.…

The relationship was explored between the ability to understand nonverbal metaphoric similarity and the ability to produce verbal metaphors to talk about that similarity. Subjects, 45 college students, were shown filmed scenes that depicted both metaphoric and literal similarity. Half of the scenes were of stationary objects and half of moving…

Treatment of theory as an analytic tool, translation of the structure of a theory into nonverbal media, and utilization of projects for the application of a theory to elicit consequences for evaluation can be used to enable students to learn sociological theory in a classroom setting by means of experience. (Author/ND)

Research supported by grants HD-01888 and HD-01136 from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and grant No. GS-541 from the National Science Foundation.

Evaluated with two age groups (mean age 8.1 years or 10.6 years) totaling 22 learning disabled children was whether there is an age related increase in recognition for visual nonverbal short term memory (STM) and the effects on STM of stimulus dimensionality, primacy, recency, and second choice responses. A serial recognition task was used to…