A stimulus preference assessment was evaluated with an adult and a child with profound mental retardation and severe self-injurious behavior, in order to better predict both the beneficial and negative side effects of stimuli in differential-reinforcement-of-other-behavior treatments. (DB)

This study of 15 children with feeding disorders investigated identification of effective behavioral reinforcers by comparing outcomes and time requirements of two procedures in which presence in a particular area produced access to a preferred stimulus (i.e., zone discrimination). Both procedures were viable reinforcer identification tools, but…

Examines arguments that language comes from innate, abstract knowledge of universal grammar that signers use to create new grammatical features. (12 references) (CK)

A potential problem for connectionist accounts of inflectional morphology is the need to learn a "default" inflection. This article demonstrates that given appropriate architectural assumptions, connectionist models are capable of learning a default category and generalizing as required, even in the absence of superior type frequency.…

In two experiments, poor and normal Dutch readers, matched for reading age, were presented with visual matching tasks on a computer screen. In the first experiment, word and pseudoword letter strings were used. Poor readers needed more time to decode uppercase/lowercase pairs, especially when the pairs consisted of pseudowords. Experiment 2…

Explored 14- and 18-month olds' ability to identify the target of the experimenter's emotional display of happiness or disgust in response to something seen or felt inside a box. Findings suggested that, regardless of age, infants used the experimenter's attentional cues to interpret her emotional signals and behaved as if they understood that she…

Low-achieving seventh-grade students were assigned to two science intervention groups, a read-and-discuss teacher-directed method group and a group in which a model of concept mapping that connected major and minor concepts followed the lesson. Results indicate that using graphic representations was more effective than the traditional approach.…

Extends dynamic attending theory to developmental questions concerning tempo and time hierarchies. Compares performance of 4- to 10-year-olds, and adults on dynamic attending activities. Suggests that growth trends could be expressed in terms of listeners' engagement of slower attending oscillators with age and musical experience, accompanied by…

Discusses the lacking role of art history in the visualization revolution stating how the discipline whose raison d'etre has been thinking with, about, and through pictures has not grappled the profound intellectual ramifications of the digital revolution. Focuses on issues that art history should address in order to realize its potential. (CMK)

Evidence is reviewed on the prevalence of sensory and motor abnormalities in autism and the effectiveness of three interventions designed to address such abnormalities: sensory integration therapy, traditional occupational therapy, and auditory integration training. Results of these limited studies provided no firm support for the interventions.…

A comparison is made between a new technique (the Handle Technique), Integrated Picture Cueing, and a Word Alone Method. Results show using a new combination of teaching strategies enabled logographic symbols to be used effectively in teaching word recognition to 12 children with severe learning difficulties. (Contains references.) (Author/CR)

Examines the influence of a student's visual access to the instructor during Internet-based audiographics training. A course was taught through lecture and slides over the Internet to students at seven remote sites and the availability of instructor video was manipulated. Results showed that increasing the video capability of an Internet-based…

Suggests that preliminary findings from research on intellectual access to digital images indicate a need for improved browsing tools, image manipulation software, feedback mechanisms, and query analysis. Discusses problems of image retrieval identified in current research, reports on an evaluation project in process, and proposes a framework for…

Finding information on the Web without encountering numerous false positives poses a challenge to multimedia information retrieval systems (MMIR). This research focuses on improving precision and recall in an MMIR system by interactively combining text processing with image processing in both the indexing and retrieval phases. A picture search…

Examines picture naming latencies for predicted effects of two word retrieval factors: onset complexity and number of syllables. Results comport with evidence from speech errors and metalinguistic tasks and with predictions of the Node Structure theory of language production, but do not support production theories that do not predict special…