Videoconferencing systems combine face-to-face and mediated interactions in distance education. We extend the use of a Social Presence measure to on-site (face-to-face) learners and distant learners. Comparison between physically present and distant located learners did not indicate significant differences in social presence. Also results indicate…

This study compared the total amount of training time and total number of trial blocks for individuals with severe developmental disabilities to acquire mands under control of unconditioned establishing operations and mands under control of transitive conditioned establishing operations for manual sign and for the Picture Exchange Communication…

We examined the relationship between three discrimination skills (visual, visual matching-to-sample, and auditory-visual) and four stimulus modalities (object, picture, spoken, and video) in assessing preferences of leisure activities for 7 adults with developmental disabilities. Three discrimination skills were measured using the Assessment of…

An 8-month prospective study examined behavioral, personality, and psychological variables thought to increase vulnerability for college women's experience of rape and verbal sexual coercion. Participants were 276 college women who completed self-report surveys. During 1 academic year, 9.5% of women were raped and 11.7% reported verbal sexual…

A large scale observational study by educational psychologists of 141 UK primary classrooms used a partial interval time-sampling observational schedule to record the frequency and type of verbal behaviour of teachers and whether students were "on-task" (following the teacher's directions) or "off-task" (not following the…

During a 15-year longitudinal study, 31 Finnish students (risk group) who had been identified as having deficiencies in reading and writing readiness at pre-school through the German Breuer-Weuffen Differentiation Test were compared with their peers (n = 62) in order to study long-term differences that emerged at the starting point of the study.…

Semiotics is the scientific study of signs and sign functions. While semiotics has most often focused on human phenomena, it has been suggested that the field should be broadened to include elements of the system of signs from the entire continuum of living reality. Such an approach is to make explanatory in a relatively "universal" way…

The ability of preschool-age children to modify their verbal communication as a function of listener attributes was explored. (JMB)

This writer suggests some Shakespearian gems for dealing with everyone from reporters to superintendents. You can try your old-time memorization techniques on these apropos utterances--and be prepared for anything. (Editor)

A study compared the content of children's drawings and verbal descriptions of a house. Drawing and verbal descriptions were collected in two sessions separated by a 1-week interval Participants were 16 children of 5 and 6 years of age who were in day care. Comparison of defining features in verbal and graphic descriptions revealed a distinction…

Making the job offer and selling the career opportunity it presents is a very important process of employment interviewing. To reduce the chance of failure to sell the candidate on his opportunity, the interviewer must understand the psychology of persuasion, borrowing some techniques from the professional salesman. (Author/BP)

These two papers discuss the hypothesis that exposing a person to interviewer behavior that is incongruent with that person's expectations creates "strain" and disruption in the interview, which is manifest in several ways including decreases in verbal productivity. (RWP)

The author describes a method for scoring Flanders' Interaction Analysis Categories when trainee teachers' competence in coding a typed transcript is being assessed. (GW)

This study demonstrated that 1-year-olds were capable of engaging other people in communicative interaction, that they adopted their messages according to the demands of the listener and situation, and that they responded to the receiver's feedback. (SB)

Young children's understanding of the effects of ambiguous and informative messages on a listener's knowledge is studied in two experiments. (PCB)