This study examined the ability of preschool children to process and use conceptual category information in a disrcimination learning task. A total of 60 boys and girls between the ages of 2 1/2 and 4 years completed a 3-choice discrimination learning task. On each of 12 trials, a child was presented with three magazine photographs: one of an…

This study used the behavioral contrast paradigm to assess the excitatory and inhibitory capabilities of young infants. Behavioral contrast is described as the phenomenon whereby the rates of responding in the presence of two stimuli, both of which were previously associated with reinforcement, change in opposite directions when only one of them…

Sixty-four preschool children were individually trained on a task requiring them to recognize an isolated phoneme in a word context. A learning set design encompassing 192 trials over eight days was employed. The major factors investigated were: the presence of a redundant visual cue; phoneme type (stop vs. continuant); phoneme position (initial…

In this study, kindergarten children classified as impulsive received (1) visual analysis training involving either motor or verbal responses, (2) were trained only to delay their responses, or (3) were assinged to a control group receiving no training. While all treatment groups showed a significant decrease in errors on the Matching Familiar…

This paper reports a study which investigated 2-month-old infants' auditory discrimination of tone quality in the male voice, extending a previous study which found that voice quality changes (soft versus harsh) in a female voice were discriminable by infants at this age. Subjects were 20 infants, tested at 8 and 9 weeks of age. Each infant was…

A method for stimulating and facilitating organizational writing in the secondary school is described in this paper. Pictorial sequences are coordinated and arranged to typify the four major styles of writing: narrative, descriptive, expository, and persuasive. These sequences both portray a meaningful event in keeping with the writing style and…

Described are basic electronic features and results of research on the Video Articulator, an electrovisual speech analyzing device which has been used in speech training for the hearing impaired. Data are presented from studies of the validity and reliability of video patterns produced by various speakers using the Video Articulator and by the…

This experiment was designed to test the hypothesis that subjects must know the length of the viewing matter they will be scanning before the target is presented in order to scan efficiently. Adult subjects were required to scan visually for a predetermined item. Targets were one, two, or four letters in length and the pairs of slides shown on…

This study was conducted to determine whether the recent semantic-physical processing distinction that Jenkins and his associates have invoked to account for differences in subjects' recall and clustering of verbal materials could be extended to include pictorial materials as well. In the first experiment, second-grade children were exposed to 15…

Evaluated were the properties and fine structures of averaged visually evoked potentials (AVEP) in 60 normal children between the ages of 2 and 9 years. Electroencephalographic recordings were taken while white diffuse flashes were used to deliver visual stimuli to the Ss. Three types of AVEP patterns were discerned, with no relationship observed…

Sixty kindergarten, 60 second-grade, and 60 fourth-grade students performed several memory tasks under one of six conditions. The conditions differed as to the method of presentation of information. The study was focused on developmental changes in children's use of verbal, nonverbal, and spatial-positional cues for memory. The results, in…

An experiment was conducted on 13 normal and 13 retarded readers, matched for age, IQ, and vocabulary. Recent findings suggested that reading retardates had difficulty in the cross-modal transfer of information from the auditory to the visual modality (e.g., converting auditory taps into visual dot patterns). Prior research by the present authors…

Forty-eight pairs of children between the ages of 4 and 8 were the subjects of this study of the development of referential communication skills and the use of technology to structure interactions between people. A communication game device was used to present children with sets of four referents on separate screens. The referents were either…

A total of 48 8- to 14-week-old infants were presented with a non-contingently moving visual stimulus and the infants' visual attention was measured. Infants who exhibited decrements in attention to the non-contingent stimulus showed recovery in attention when the same stimulus was made to move contingent upon a motor response. Moreover, wisual…

Seventy-two preschoolers and 72 second graders observed a model choose his "favorites" in a series of common object trios and were then asked to recall the model's choices. Children at each age witnessed the procedure under a fixed level of distraction, under instructions either to 'look' or 'remember,' and under one of three vicarious consequence…