A review of "Sign Languages Used by Deaf People, and Psycholinguistics: A Critical Evaluation" (A. Van Uden, 1986), a book "denying that ...there is any such thing as a sign language," points out that a sign language's perceived lack of phonological and morphological rules is a more social than linguistic problem. (CB)

Virtual reality (VR) is a new computational paradigm that redefines the interface between human and computer. VR may result in a significant improvement over traditional instruction because it is not only a multimedia interactive tool but also a learning environment extremely close to reality. Few empirical studies have been done on the use of VR…

Groups of mentally retarded subjects matched for sex, chronological age, mental age, and length of institutionalization were observed on three reaction time tasks for which pre-response complexity varied. Down's Syndrome subjects did not differ from epileptic and undifferentiated retarded subjects in reaction time performance on any of the tasks.…

The role of sensory attributes in a vocabulary learning task was investigated for a non-oral language using deaf and hearing individuals, more or less skilled in the use of sign language. Skilled signers encoded invented signs in terms of linguistic structure rather than as visual-pictorial events. (Author/RD)

When Chinese adults tried to name the color of characters which represented conflicting color words, they showed greater interference than did English speaking readers of the same task in English. This effect cannot be attributed to bilingualism. There may be fundamental differences in the perceptual demands of reading Chinese and English.…

Hemispheric processing of visually presented words and pictures was examined in third and seventh graders and college students. Pictorial or symbolic stimuli were presented singly to either the right or left visual hemifield and subjects had to decide whether the first stimulus in a pair matched the second stimulus. (JMB)

Addresses the challenge of using the target language as the medium of instruction to teach a second language to secondary learners. The article examines teachers' concerns regarding teaching in the target language and suggests practical teaching strategies, including instructing students to listen closely, to watch for visual cues, to watch each…

Discusses two experiments investigating non-antecedent suppression in American Sign Language (ASL). Findings indicate that spoken and signed languages use the same processing mechanisms in resolving co-reference relations. Results also indicate that within the probe recognition paradigm, the spatial indexing of ASL pronouns is similar to gender…

Results of four experiments show that developmental differences in elaborative conceptual processing at acquisition and retrieval contribute independently to developmental increases in recall. Item identification processes for both words and pictures constrain children's elaborative processing. The constraints are time limited. (RH)

A 12-year-old boy with severe disabilities was taught street-crossing skills through the use of photographs with verbal rehearsal of appropriate street crossing, followed by community-based instruction. The skills were acquired, maintained at follow up, and generalized to new streets. (JDD)

Explored the notion that children's difficulty in reading is a sign of a general inability to selectively attend to parts of perceptual wholes. Children and adults classified triads of spoken syllables and visual objects. Classification of speech was related to reading and spelling ability, but not to classification of visual stimuli. (BC)

Describes a study that was conducted to examine the effects of captioned video material of varying difficulty on intermediate and advanced English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) students' comprehension with videotaped episodes presenting low and high audio/video correlation. Captions were found to be more important for low audio/video correlation. (17…

Examined how exposure to a program of fractal computer graphics affected the perceptual sensitivity of sixth-grade students (n=197) to the natural visual environment. MANCOVA analysis of collected data and students' written responses to questions indicated that environmental perceptual sensitivity was higher for subjects exposed to fractal images.…

We investigated the relationship between three potential markers for reading difficulties (phonemic awareness, verbal short-term memory, and rapid automatized naming) and students' responsiveness to Reading Recovery instruction. At pretest, students' most prevalent weakness was on phonemic awareness, but more than half were below average on rapid…

The "Central Dogma" of genetics states that one gene, located in a DNA molecule, is ultimately translated into one protein. As important as this idea is, many teachers shy away from teaching the actual mechanism of gene translation, and many students find the concepts abstract and inaccessible. This article describes a unit, called Genetics…