Subjects were 65 six-, eight-, ten-, and twelve-year olds from after-school day care programs. The subjects were unobtrusively observed in free play situations involving peers and the duration of their interactions in six types of peer groups of varying size were recorded. Subjects were also administered a picture card test, composed of 20 sets of…

Consistent learning gains are associated with the use of pictures when experiments adhere to five ground rules: (1) prose passages are presented orally; (2) the subjects are children; (3) the passages are fictional narratives; (4) the pictures overlap the story content; and (5) learning is demonstrated by factual recall. (Author)

The stimuli in two artificial letter learning experiments varied in print size and dimensionality. Preschool children made the least errors when the stimuli were three dimensional, large print, and the children were directed to manipulate the letters. Replication with kindergarten children failed to show any differences among the treatments.…

A discussion of the merits of using pictures, particularly authentic ones, as a component of the evaluation process in foreign language classes. Three reasons are given: pictures provide a setting for testing communication skills; they give a sociocultural context; their use can be student-centered. (Text is in French.) (AMH)

A short analysis of four methods of instruction in writing, particularly the transition from the aural-oral to the writing stage. The question is raised as to the usefulness of pictures. They might be better used as a motivational aid than as an instructional tool. (Text is in French.) (AMH)

Reviewed is the Sequenced Inventory of Communication Development, a test intended to provide speech and language pathologists information on early communicative behaviors. (BD)

To detect the underlying structural relationship or chain among certain memorized pairs, two groups of undergraduates verbally reordered previously memorized pairs of either concrete or abstract nouns. The superior performance of the concrete word subjects was attributed to the differential effect of imaginal versus verbal encoding. (Author/CP)

Predictions were derived from the assumption that the vocabulary store underlying the auditory analysis of verbal stimuli is organized as an acoustic space rather than as a lexicon (tree) or collection. The relationship between frequency of occurrence in the language and frequency of occurrence as an error is low. (Author/SW)

Interest in babies was assessed for 32 children aged 8 to 9 years and 32 children aged 14 to 15 years. Data were collected by means of a 6-second time sampling of waiting room behaviors in the presence of a live baby and by reactions to pictures of babies versus other objects. (Author/JMB)

The relation between conceptual development and visual exploratory behavior was investigated by engaging eighty-four 3-, 4-, and 8-year-old children in a picture-sorting task to determine whether they would spontaneously and readily discriminate between animate and inanimate objects. (Author/JMB)

Describes using picture riddles to present situations, problems, or puzzles in graphic form to stimulate student enthusiasm. Included are five picture riddles. (SL)

Brain-injured (N=24), cultural-familially retarded (N=24), and nonretarded (N=28) adolescents and young adults were compared on a letter priming task requiring recognition of matched pairs. Response time in both retarded groups was considerably slower than in the nonretarded group, and effortful processing was also slower to develop. (JW)

Two experiments comparing the effectiveness of direct versus mnemonic instruction in teaching learning-disabled high school students (N=56) and educable mentally retarded junior high school students (N=8) about the hardness of minerals indicated that students taught with the mnemonic pictorial method substantially outperformed direct instruction…

For this study, computer technology was used to teach attentional skills to six young children. Prior reinforcement histories of individual stimuli were manipulated to examine whether they are the variable that controls the features of compound cues to which young children attend. (RWB)

Investigates the role of intraverbal learning (a process through which semantic knowledge is acquired from purely linguistic information) in preschool children's acquisition of semantic concepts. Shows that the relative effectiveness of pictorial and intraverbal information depends on the child's age, the type of information supplied, and the…