Two experiments evaluated the effects of mnemonic training upon 5- and 10-year-old children's learning and retention of patterns at varying intervals. Subjects were 172 middle class children evenly distributed across the two age groups. Experiment I investigated the effects of individual strategies (perceptual exploration, organization of…

This paper summarizes most of what Sign linguists know about the function of the eyes in American Sign Language discourse. Here, "eyes" is taken to cover both opening and closing of the eyes and looking in a particular direction, referred to as the signer's "gaze-direction." Evidence is presented demonstrating that a signer's gaze can be lexically…

Rebuts an article that claimed to overthrow the authors' 1969 findings. It is demonstrated that the original study concerned syntactic organization and that interpretation of it as bearing on comprehension is largely unjustified. Comments on their prior work in light of new developments in child language are included. (EJS)

An overview of the topics in this issue. The place of authentic documents; their use in promoting communicative competence; new uses of visuals, such as cartoons; visuals for evaluation purposes; their cultural value; and the development of video-cassettes are discussed. (Text is in French.) (AMH)

Nine moderately/severely retarded adolescents and young adults were trained to use coin-operated washing machines using three types of materials: artificial (pictures), simulated (cardboard replicas), and natural (realistic). Most students increased their laundry performance with all three sets of school-based material, but generalization to…

A 3-year-old (severely retarded and visually impaired) was trained in a program emphasizing functional, age-appropriate visual motor tasks requiring use of vision for successful task completion. Use of a repeated prompting procedure was successful in establishing visual attention, and generalization of visual attention to untrained tasks was…

Reviews research that shows positive contribution of pictures to young children's recall of prose material and describes two experiments conducted with college graduate students to see if positive effects can be extended to older learners. Results after immediate and delayed testing show recall is improved for older learners as well. (Author/LRW)

Reports on a study conducted in Spain in which the environmental preferences of 11 to 14-year-old children were examined using a collection of photographs. Results include the indication that the environmental attitudes of children attending a 15-day nature camp changed noticeably in at least five different aspects. (TW)

The recognition performance for segmental stimuli was compared when presented through a single-channel tactile device and through a 24-channel vocoder. Both consonant and vowel stimuli were tested under visual only, tactile only, and visual/tactile conditions. Results indicated no significant performance differences for the 12 artificially…

Answers of undergraduate Brazilian English as a foreign language students (N=40) to an open-ended and a multiple-choice reading comprehension test revealed that three prereading activities (pictorial context, vocabulary preteaching, and prequestioning) resulted in higher reading comprehension. (Author/CB)

When selecting instructional materials and curricula for developing critical television viewing skills with gifted students, teachers should consider: the track record of the materials; media experience of the students; and other visual stimuli in the classroom. The teacher's and parents' roles identified in the materials should also be…

To examine use of antecedent cues to complete a sequence of vocational tasks, five mildly to moderately mentally retarded students (aged 16-19) served as subjects. Written and pictorial prompts, introduced in a least intrusive manner, enabled the students to learn and maintain a sequenced time-based schedule that changed daily. (Author/JDD)

Describes seven learning techniques that cognitive psychologists have identified as leading to substantially heightened learning across a variety of situations: attention; curiosity and learning; thematic lesson organization; high information flow; mnemonics; concrete representations; and Zeigarnik effect. Research on their effectiveness and their…

Describes two experiments conducted with undergraduate students to determine effects of field dependence/independence on visual characteristics and presentation modes. The first studied content information recall from still projected visuals of different sizes and types of illustrations; the second studied visual-location task performance and…

Reports on a study that investigated the span of letter recognition (the region of text from which letter information is used during a fixation) for good and poor fifth-grade readers during a reading task. (HOD)