Young children increasingly interact with technological devices, either as a form of entertainment or for educational purposes. This research sought to investigate the early symbolic understanding of an interactive, three-dimensional digital image presented on a tablet. Two studies were designed in which the children had to use the image as a…

We aimed to longitudinally examine how symbolic distancing affects preschool children's delay tolerance in a delay choice task. We presented children with choices between a smaller immediate reward and a larger delayed reward in conditions with either symbolic stimuli or edible rewards. Overall, symbolic distancing modulated children's delay…

This research investigated whether symbolic understanding of pictures in low-functioning children with autism is mediated by iconicity and language. In Experiment 1, participants were taught novel words paired with unfamiliar pictures that varied in iconicity (black-and-white line drawings, greyscale photographs, colour line drawings, colour…

Graphic symbols are commonly used across countries in order to support individuals with communicative deficiency. The literature review revealed the absence of such a system for Turkish socio-cultural context. In this study, the aim was to develop a symbol system appropriate for the Turkish socio-cultural context. The process began with studies…

This research investigated the extent and nature of the informational support that enables young children to understand pictures as symbols. Two experiments were conducted using an object-retrieval task. The first experiment varied the amount (complete and no instructions) and kind of information (intended function of the symbol and…

Describes a developmental study of semantic structures in children who are asked to determine the fitness of descriptive labels for line drawings representing a variety of perceptual stimuli. (Author/WY)

Studies the processing of pictures and words as symbols. Shows that the superiority of pictures results from the fact that pictures are interpreted more quickly than words, but that after the interpretation is made, processing is the same. Also gives evidence that pictures and words are both processed in terms of linguistic codes rather than…

Children learned two linear function rules under varying conditions: presence vs. absence of pointing; visual cues (context vs. weight vs. both pictured); and a verbal-only baseline condition. A complex rule was learned as a transfer task. Visual cues aided both learning and transfer; pointing helped initial learning, but retarded transfer.…

Describes two studies in which young children were shown pictures that represented sound with postures and contexts, with conventions, and with combinations of information. Shows that the different types of pictorial representation of sound were not equivalent in their ability to evoke a correct interpretation. (HOD)

This study examined the discriminability of lexigrams versus printed words with eight adults with severe mental retardation. A match-to-sample teaching paradigm was used. Subjects discriminated lexigrams better than printed letters and were more successful at matching lexigrams to referent objects than matching printed words to referent objects.…

Infants' understanding of "toy model-real exemplar" relations was assessed through preferential looking and habituation tasks. Results from the preferential looking task suggest that 18-month toddlers are just beginning to demonstrate comprehension of symbolic relations between iconic models and their real object counterparts. Performance of 10-…

The relationship between sign and verbal learning was explored using 10 severely mentally retarded adults. They were taught color labels in sign, verbal, or sign and verbal groups. Sign labels tended to be learned more efficiently; combined sign and verbal training improved verbal learning but not sign learning. (Author/CM)

This article urges teachers to guide gifted students in constructing meaning through creating and viewing non-print texts. It discusses how visual images can be used to capture symbols of leadership, record and celebrate leadership in action, interpret the attributes of leadership in new ways, and recognize leaders in the community. (Contains one…

Additional support to a stimulus-response (S-R) association by the use of an extraneous stimulus is called "prompting." Prompting has an effect on learner achievement particularly if the prompting agent is identical on successive S-R trials. This experiment sought to analyze the differences in learner achievement when different prompting stimuli…

This study evaluated the recognition and retention of transparent and nontransparent manual signs by 50 sign-naive hearing college freshmen. There was a significant decrease in the number of nontransparent signs retained as the period of time after training increased. Implications for sign language training with nonverbal hearing persons are…