Investigates the resolution of inconsistent attitude communications by schizophrenic patients as compared to a matched group of normal subjects. Twelve inconsistent messages served as the experimental stimuli. Some general guidelines for the practicing therapist and implications for double-bind theory are discussed. (Editor/RK)

It is a common assumption that memories consist of sets of interrelated features of attributes. Rigorous and direct investigation of the functional properties of these sets has been relatively neglected. Questions whether the interrelationships of different components are reflexive or asymmetric and how components interact when more than one is…

Why does the rehearsal of information not interfere with a subject's temporal judgments. Offers evidence in favor of one possible interpretation. Taking an analogy from the phenomenon of the localization of sound in a sound-reverberating room, this research suggests a precedence effect in verbal information processing. (Author/RK)

A study of three children (ages 3-5) with developmental disabilities evaluated the effects of environmental enrichment on self-injurious behavior. Each child participated in a free-operate preference assessment to identify relative preferences for aberrant behavior. This assessment correctly predicted the success of environmental enrichment to…

Discusses two auditory comprehension studies that investigated the role of focus, as conveyed by a pitch accent, in the comprehension of relative clauses preceded by a complex noun phrase. Findings include focus attracts modifiers, and pitch accents for new phrases differ acoustically from pitch accents for contrastive phrases. (46 references)…

Examines the perception of flaming (hostile verbal behavior) in electronic mail by exploring, in the context of five escalating levels of socioemotional intensity, the effects of pictographs (typographic symbols used to express emotion) and quoting. Results suggest pictographs and quoting can vary in perceived intensity and meaning, depending on…

Describes the cross-modal semantic priming paradigm, including its underlying rationale and the different tasks with which it is combined. Introduces the type of stimuli used and the dependent and independent variables typically manipulated; discusses the paradigm's main advantages and drawbacks; and considers its most important areas of…

Presents an activity for teaching communicative competence in the Spanish as a foreign language classroom. (Author/VWL)

Offers resolutions to the paradox of infants' ability to abstract patterns over specific items and toddlers' lack of ability to generalize patterns over specific English words/constructions. Argues that contradictions are rooted in differing methodologies and stimuli content. Suggests that the patterns infants extract from linguistic input are not…

Concerned the effects of questions about word meaning during an immediate lexical learning task. English-speaking learners of Spanish as a second language attempted to learn 24 new Spanish words while viewing word-picture pairs. Results indicated significantly greater cued-recall scores in the no questions condition than in the questions…

Examined the effect of attention on infants' responses to briefly exposed visual stimuli. Found that the duration of stimulus exposure in the familiarization phase was positively correlated with the preference for the novel stimulus in the paired-comparison procedure, and processing of briefly presented visual stimuli differed depending on the…

Sought to establish a valid computer measurement technique for educational assessment applications. Similarities and differences in performance on visual discrimination tasks for young children of normal development and adolescents with severe mental retardation were analyzed using multiple testing procedures. Found differences in the two groups…

Argues that the human brain is not specialized to deal with 20th-century media. Measures effects of image size and motion on college students' emotional responses. Finds that image size positively affects the arousal and dominates dimensions of emotional responses, but has no significant effect on valance evaluations. Finds that still pictures…

Investigates how output can be a process by which second language (L2) learners test out hypotheses about the L2 and the extent to which learner hypothesis testing attempts that result in non-target like (NTL) output are challenged by interlocutors. A picture-descriptions task was used to collect data from eight native- and eight…

Studied the influence of lexical factors, known to impact lexical access in adults, on the word retrieval of children. Participants included 320 typical and atypical language learning children, ranging from 7 to 12 years of age. Lexical factors examined included word frequency, age of acquisition, neighborhood density, neighborhood frequency, and…