Although English for Academic Purposes researchers have devoted considerable attention to written texts, they have paid less attention to the use of visual representation in the disciplines. This article describes strategies of a first-year university student as she privileges visual texts in both her macroeconomics and reading/writing classes.…

Investigated the time course of activation of the mental representations of word meanings in a series of three cross-modal priming experiments. The study interprets the data with respect to both localist and distributed implementations of the cohort model. Results indicate that if early competition among simultaneously activated meanings exists,…

To examine how four methods of symbolizing data affect learning from thematic maps of familiar regions, two experiments were conducted with college students. In both experiments, map-related text information was recalled more than map-unrelated text information. Choropleth maps and proportional symbol maps were associated with higher reported use…

This study assessed the possibility of guiding a person with blindness and intellectual disability during indoor travel with fewer auditory cues. Results indicated that infrequent presentation of the cues and the provision of extra cues in case of errors maintained high levels of independent moves, albeit of increased duration. (Author/CR)

Presents two studies documenting the use of the Picture Exchange Communication System (PECS) for 31 preschool children with severe disabilities. Initial findings indicated the children could learn to use PECS quickly and efficiently. The second study, which included 18 participants, found that PECS use generalized to untrained settings. (Author/CR)

A study examined the influence of background noise on levels of problem behavior and pain behavior under functional analysis conditions for a 5-year-old with Williams syndrome and hyperacusis. When the child was fitted with earplugs, there were substantial decreases in both problem and pain behavior under the background noise condition. (Contains…

Demonstrates how three kinds of pictures--advertisements, calendars, and cartoons--can be used for stimulating and sustaining verbal output in the English-as-a-Foreign/Second-Language classroom. Techniques include discussion, matching, debates, role play, and telling a story. Ten steps to building a language teaching picture file are included.…

This article discusses integrating communication skills and the use of real object "props" with the teaching of literature to students with severe and profound and multiple learning difficulties. The novel "Oliver Twist" is used to illustrate how objects of reference can be used to teach literature and promote communication skills. (Contains…

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.…