Twelve individuals (ages 3-43) with severe/profound mental retardation and life-threatening self-injurious behaviors were exposed to electrical aversion treatment using a remotely controlled device. With seven individuals, suppression of the behavior was nearly complete in that physical restraints were no longer necessary. With three individuals,…

Examines, through two studies, how prosodic information affects syntactic processing in locally ambiguous sentences. The first study dealt with people's judgments of the continuation of locally ambiguous sentence fragments of differing lengths. The second concerned ratings of normality of sentence types with differing contours. (27 references)…

Compared effects of syntactic context and attention on identifying masked spoken words in reading-disabled seventh graders and good readers. Found that, in both groups, syntactic structure of context triggers a process of anticipation for particular syntactic categories based on an assumption that linguistic messages are syntactically coherent;…

Summarizes the use of word-spotting in psycholinguistic research. Notes that listeners hear a list of nonsense words, some of which contain embedded real words, and they detect those embedded words, a task designed to study the segmentation of continuous speech. Describes the task and summarizes its advantages and disadvantages. (12 references)…

Examined children's and adults' perceptions of facial stimuli that were either systematically exaggerated (caricatures) or de-exaggerated (anticaricatures) relative to a norm face. Found that all ages perceived caricatures as the most distinctive version and anticaricatures as least distinctive; the smallest effect was for 6-year-olds. Caricatures…

Results of a study with 52 dyslexic children and 52 normal readers show that reading acceleration through computer-controlled reading rates improves reading performance in both groups, but auditory masking by playing a song is beneficial only to the dyslexic children. Implications are discussed in terms of phonological processing. (SLD)

A new paradigm is presented for investigating how intervening concepts are learned. Results of four experiments involving 85 college students provide converging evidence for the acquisition of intervening concepts. A simple associative learning mechanism is proposed to account for the results. The new paradigm uses a stimulus-response-feedback…

Matching-to-sample skills are involved in language acquisition and reading and counting abilities. The rapid, even errorless, induction of matching performances in young children and 28 individuals with mental retardation (ages 11-20) was demonstrated through the structuring of a visual array that promoted detection of the relevant stimulus.…

A study examined the effects of a CD-ROM audio textbook, alone and combined with a complementary strategy (SLiCK), on the academic performance of 95 students with mild disabilities from 8 self-contained special education classes. Students in groups using the audio text performed significantly higher on content-area assessment than other students.…

Three experiments investigated discrimination and memory of 5.5-month-olds for videotapes of women performing different activities (blowing bubbles, brushing hair, brushing teeth) or static displays after a 1-minute and a 7-week delay. Findings demonstrate the attentional salience of actions over faces in dynamic events to 5.5-month-olds. Findings…

Three experiments examined development of perceptual causality in 3- to 9-year-olds. Findings indicated that participants of all ages assigned contact events (A moves toward B, which moves upon contact) to the physical domain and non-contact events (B moves before contact) to the psychological domain. Participants chose causality more often for…

A collage with pictorial and verbal stimuli to assess life skills of young workers was developed using a framework for alternative assessment and stimuli instruments. The instrument was evaluated using Bloom's taxonomy for the cognitive domain and Krathwohl et al.'s taxonomy for the affective domain. (Contains 16 references.) (SK)

This study compared responses of 16 pupils either with or without autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) and matched for gender and verbal ability. Subjects' responses to various pictures were categorized. Results suggested errors made by the two groups differed both quantitatively and qualitatively. Errors made by pupils with ASD were largely…

Examines form-similar nouns in early lexical development of a bilingual German/English child, as well as effects of form similarity in picture naming and translation in two groups of German/English children. Results show an effect of form similarity in early lexical development; form similar words occurred frequently in the beginning of the…

The study, involving 39 intermediate-grade disabled readers, found that visualization instruction plus pictorial display, in which subjects were instructed to make pictures in their minds and were shown a pictorial display that illustrated the temporal-spatial sequence of the reading text, was particularly effective in facilitating subjects'…