This study, involving six individuals with mental retardation or emotional disturbance, compared the effectiveness of four stimulus control procedures on attainment of sight vocabulary. Results indicated no clear advantage for any one of the four procedures (stimulus shaping, stimulus fading, time delay, and trial and error). (JDD)

This article reviews the history and use of tactual maps by blind and visually impaired travelers. It discusses textual patterns, symbols, and graphics; differences between conventional geographic-cartographic maps and strip maps used as navigational aids; and current advances, including disposable, quick-to-produce, and easy-to-update strip maps.…

Six patients with cleft palate were provided treatment using either visual feedback for tongue placement and frication or no visual feedback. Results indicated the feedback was especially useful in the treatment of defective /s/ sounds in the patients who exhibited abnormal posterior tongue posturing during dental or alveolar sounds. (Author/DB)

Used data from infants in operant head-turning procedure to examine effects of structure and redundancy of speech context on discovery of two target syllables. Clustering strategy, which presupposes basic element of perception and aggregates these elements to form units, may complement bracketing strategy, which presupposes endpoint cues and…

Children of 8 and 11 years and college students were tested for reorientation of visual attention to a target following a cue. The first, but not the second, experiment showed an interaction between distance of target from fixation and stimulus onset asynchrony. The second experiment suggested children can orient attention through valid, neutral,…

Children's memory of single infant experience was evaluated. At 6.5 months, infants participated in study of reaching in light and dark for sounding object. Children repeated dark procedure in laboratory when they were either one year or two years older. Older children with infant experience reached and grasped the sounding object significantly…

Children and adults were tested on a mental rotation task in which letters were presented in different orientations. The task was performed by itself or with a memory task. Results indicated that the relation of response time to stimulus orientation in the rotation task was the same in both conditions. (BC)

College undergraduates (N=136) studied a hierarchical plant classification system using a figural taxonomy or a pictorial mnemonomy. Mnemonomy students outperformed taxonomy students on (1) immediate and five-day delayed measures of classification system construction and use; and (2) a test that required solving analogies involving plant terms.…

Subjects were 30 participants at each of 4 ages: 5, 7, and 10 years, and adult. Subjects described objects ordered in pairs. Children of 5 and 7 years improved their ability to understand visual metaphors which display a topic-visual interaction. From age 5 to adulthood, subjects improved their ability to comprehend metaphoric similarity. (RH)

Presents a tested hypothesis raised by an earlier study and confirmed that query-surrogate documents chosen from within dense interdocument structures in scaled and visualized TREC Topic document data sets increased the number of relevant documents retrieved by 26-46%. Performance of information retrieval systems on data sets for which relevant…

Analysis of Web site images of aging to identify positive and negative representations can help teach students about social perceptions of older adults. Another learning experience involves consideration of the needs of older adults in Web site design. (SK)

This study compared two methods of speech elicitation for phonological assessment: conversation and picture naming with 13 male phonologically impaired children (ages 4.2 to 5.11 years). Results suggest that both methods are useful clinical assessment tools but that the picture-naming test may tap the child's phonological system more deeply and be…

A study, including research and practice notes by various authors, investigated whether extended training in an acoustically rich environment could enhance the spatial updating ability of 12 adults with congenital blindness. After training, the adults' distance perception from a home-base location and novel locations was superior to a sighted…

Investigates the effect of orientation of depth cues on the magnitude of perceived depth in pictures. Finds that, for each test drawing, the orientation with the far point above the near point provided greater depth perception than any other orientation. Discusses possible contributions of observer experience and height of visual field. (DSK)

Three threshold hypotheses proposed by Cummins (1976) and Diaz (1985) as explanations of data on the cognitive consequences of bilingualism are examined in depth and compared to one another. A neuroscientifically updated information-processing perspective on the interaction of second-language comprehension and visual-processing ability is…