Ninety-five children in 28 nursery school classrooms were used to investigate the relationships between teacher facilitative or directive verbal behavior in nursery school classrooms and seven aspects of child language change (receptive vocabulary, vocabulary of use, mean length of response, complexity of sentences, inquiry statements, dramatic…

Composition instructors need to emphasize to their students that persuasion is not always announced--it can be forcefully present in so-called "objective" forms of discourse like textbooks and news. News photographs can be successfully used in the composition classroom as a unit of study in visual rhetoric to introduce students to the…

This study was conducted to determine if viewing a commercially prepared videotape containing written and aural subliminal messages was more effective at producing weight loss than a videotape containing the same content, but without the subliminals. Participants included undergraduate and graduate students from Iowa State University (N=51) who…

This discussion and critique of television programs used in two courses--D102 (vandalism) and M101 (mathematics)--at the British Open University suggests that the television presentation of real life-like raw material can facilitate the comprehension of abstract material inasmuch as it provides concrete illustrations, and provides an opportunity…

To determine what general aspects of photographs appeal to readers--as opposed to subject matter categories that might or might not be tied to events--95 college students reported their readership of three alternate front pages of the daily student newspaper. Specifically, the study examined whether readers were more likely to read stories…

In two separate experiments, children (2nd and 7th graders) and adults generated oral descriptions of the picture stories in the WISC-R picture arrangement task. Comprehension of the stories was assessed by subjects' use of logical connectives and by mention of subtle themes in interpreting the more difficult stories. In both experiments and on…

The high school version of the Watson-Barker Listening Test was developed in response to the need for a listening test appropriate for high school students. The test was comprised of conversations that would normally occur in either the high school setting or in the home and was developed in two different versions. The test consists of five…

This paper considers ways in which the organization of text can be made explicit through verbal cuing and the ways in which this organization can be related to the cognitive processes of the reader. It is noted that the textual factors supplementary to the main content play an important part in the comprehension of text and are, thus, important…

Eight 2-month-old Japanese infants and their 25- to 30-year-old mothers participated in an investigation of the characteristics of pleasure vocalization, correlations in pitch and duration between motherese and pleasure vocalizations, and similarities in the melody types of motherese and pleasure vocalizations. Motherese, infant vocalizations…

A study examined the effects of sex, handedness, and instructions in the processing of verbal and spatial information presented tachistoscopically. Subjects, 48 volunteers from Illinois Benedictine College, were evenly distributed in terms of sex and handedness, and were further divided into two subgroups based on whether visual field attendance…

A study investigated some of the ways in which phenomena are perceived and translated into speech, especially in the assignment of agents in a given situation. Subjects were 16 adults with infant children. The adults were shown the Visual Cliff series of pictures of an infant crawling to its mother across a glass sheet covering an open space with…

The examination of saccadic eye movements--rapid shifts in gaze from one visual area of interest to another--is useful in studying pilot's visual learning in flight simulator training. Saccadic eye movements are the basic oculomotor response associated with the acquisition of visual information and provide an objective measure of higher perceptual…

In order to compare the instructional effectiveness of realistic and non-realistic color cueing on visualized instruction, an instructional unit on the human heart, using slides and an audiotape, was presented to 244 college students. Four treatment groups received the same oral presentation, with the addition of different types of visual…

The instructional effectiveness of integrating abstract and realistic visualization was studied using five types of visualization, three levels of general ability and two modes of instruction. The dependent variable was performance on a four-part criterion test representing five different types of instructional objectives, which was administered…

Memory for sex of the speaker and language of presentation of a spoken message was high and reliably better when the features were instrumental for comprehending the message than when they were not. This suggests that the physical characteristics of an event may be deeply or elaborately encoded when they are meaningful in light of the task…