The purposes of this study were to provide information about how formal features of television are related to children's selective attention and to determine how selective attention is related, in turn, to comprehension of content. Formal features are defined as attributes of television productions that are relatively content-free and that result…

Fifteen normal-speaking kindergarteners, 15 kindergarteners with defective r's, and 15 preschoolers sound identification task which included sounds the speech-defective Ss misarticulated and sounds they articulated correctly. (GW)

The effects of aural and pictorial elaborative prompts were estimated separately for response and associative phase components of children's noun-pair learning. Indices of response learning revealed equivalent effects among prompt conditions whereas measures of associative learning demonstrated substantial performance facilitation as a function of…

This paper reports an attempt to research sensory overstimulation in a variety of children's television programs by rating the level of visual sensory stimulation, auditory sensory stimulation, verbal response patterns and nonverbal response patterns in 45 television programs designed for pre-school children. The Television Rating Inventory (TVRI)…

The objectives of this study were to determine: (1) the variables that influence the learning of verbal material received by subjects via the aural modality, (2) how learning under conditions of aural reception compare with learning of the same materials under appropriately equivalent visual conditions, and (3) in what combinations learning is…

In a poststimulus cueing task subjects reported either the identity of items or their category membership. Results indicated that readout from Visual Information Storage (VIS) is not selective for conceptual categories. Rapid conceptual categorization of the type found in visual search experiments probably occurs at a processing stage subsequent…

The purposes of this study are (1) to analyze learning ability in newborns using heart rate responses to auditory temporal conditioning and (2) to correlate these with measures on the Brazelton Neonatal Behavioral Assessment Scale. Twenty normal neonates were tested using the Brazelton Scale on the third day of life. They were also given a…

This study investigates the hypotheses set forth by Russian researchers that there may be identified a pervasive characteristic of the central nervous system labeled as "strength". Ten of the 12 measures used were direct replications of representative strength measures derived from the Russian work. Two additional measures were included to test…

To assess the effects of familiar social stimuli on arousal in a novel and mildly stressful environment, skin conductance was measured in 4-year-old nursery school children who experienced this environment under two conditions: (a) alone, and (b) in the presence of a close friend. The study was intended to test Zajonc's (1965) social facilitation…

The results of this research indicated that black and white voices used in instructional materials are accepted by both white and black pupils, however white pupils rated visuals representing only black people lower than visuals representing only white people. (RC)

An experiment is reported which shows that with identical preceding context, the same initial phoneme targets contained in high transitional probability words were responded to significantly faster than those in low transitional probability words. The result argues for the importance of transitional probability as an independent variable in…

A computer/tape recorder interface was designed, which permits automatic oral adminstration of "true-false" or "multiple-choice" type tests. This paper describes the hardware and control program software, which were developed to implement the method on a DEC PDP 11 computer. (Author/JKS)

An experiment tests conjectures that right ear advantage (REA) has an auditory origin in competition or interference between acoustically similar stimuli and that feature-sharing effect (FSE) has its origin in assignment of features of phonetically similar stimuli. No effect on the REA for acoustic similarity, and a clear effect of acoustic…

Free recall lists were presented to young (N=42) and old (N=42) males under three conditions: (a) active auditory; (b) passive auditory; and (c) visual only. The young group recalled more words than the old at each presentation position under each condition. (Author)