Research supported by research grant MH-03008 from NIMH, U.S. Public Health Service.

Errors made by 5- and 8-year-old children asked to draw a model were investigated in two studies. Results from both indicated that 5-year-old children are more likely to produce visually accurate drawings than had previously been supposed; for both ages difficulty in producing accurate drawings occurred when drawing rules and conventions…

Efficacy of object manipulation and picture identification to teach single words was assessed with four 23- to 40-month-old language impaired children at sensorimotor development level. Among results: two children learned more nouns and verbs in object manipulation condition. (Author)

Research is reviewed on the use of pictures to teach concepts to handicapped children. Five general conclusions are drawn including (1) young children prefer, can recognize, and can learn concepts from pictures and outline figures and (2) pictures should be realistic and simple with an unsaturated hue to reduce distractibility. (CL)

Three experiments demonstrate that the context of a two-object array greatly influences the way in which young children represent the array in their copies. Children were aware of differences in orientation and in the nature of paired objects and were concerned with marking these differences in their drawings. (RH)

Two groups of 20 trainable mentally retarded (12- to 14-year-old) children each participated in a 26-week course during which recognition and transfer to standard orthography were measured. The cued-word group was significantly superior in reading words in standard orthography during training as well as at the end of training. (Author/CL)

The study involving three mentally retarded children (7 to 10 years old) compared the effectiveness of preventing incorrect responses with allowing trial and error responses to a set of verbal instructions. Data provided further evidence for the notion of errorless discrimination learning. (SB)

The fact that a significant amount of release from proactive interference was obtained with subjects in this study by shifting between differentially arousing categories of words suggested that rated word arousal is an encoding dimension in short-term memory. (CM)

The author speculates on the mythic symbolism of the maze and describes her work with learning disabled students who responded favorably to mazes, especially to visualization tasks involving mazes. (CL)

The results offered little support for the hypothesis that teaching severely retarded learners to label stimuli would reduce the likelihood of stimulus overselectivity. (Author)