Assesses, in a storytelling situation, the relative contributions of feedback indicative of comprehension and the perceived age of the listener. Chidren three years old and five years old were asked to tell stories to both an adult and a doll resembling a toddler. The doll was constructed with an internal speaker so that it could "carry on a…

A study of how variables such as motivation, constraint, difficulty, and function in questioning may affect the child's responsiveness to mother questions suggests that functionally defined question types are differentiable by both their relative power to elicit a child response and the manner in which they are presented. (MSE)

Studied subjects' judgments concerning the affective and control connotations of sentences describing interpersonal relationships. Females judged interpersonal relations to be more extreme in affect while males judged the same relations to be more extreme in control. Implications for communication problems between individuals of opposite sex were…

Broadens the search for correlates of locus of control orientation by examining the observable behaviors of mothers and their seven- to eight-year-old children in a work task that elicited differential dependency responses. (RH)

Examined frequency of verbal attention-seeking responses (VASRs) as an indication of level of social confidence. Veteran drug addicts received communication skills and assertiveness training. Comparison of VASRs indicated communication training was effective in improving social confidence. (RC)

Examined whether different levels of task complexity result in variations in group decision making. Groups (N=7) discussed problems varying in levels of complexity. Findings suggested that group decision making is a cyclical process with the number of cycles affected by task complexity. (RC)

Presents illustrative calls received at a metropolitan telephone counseling center. Discusses the advantages of this technique including accessibility, and anonymity. Also discusses limitations of the method. (RC)

Randomly assigned undergraduate students (N=60) enrolled in human relations training to one of six treatment groups. Asked students to respond either orally or in written form. Mode of response was shown to have a significant effect on participants' level of responding, perceptions of their helpfulness, and length of response. (Author)

The two experiments involving six developmentally-delayed preschoolers showed that the delay technique is quick to teach and simple to implement, that delays provide opportunities for children to initiate, that teachers can generalize their use of delay to novel self-selected situations, and that teachers can maintain their use of delays over…

Thirty verbal and nonverbal behaviors were analyzed from videotapes of mother-child interactions. As a group, the mothers of normally developing young children did not differ from the mothers of young children with language disorders in the frequency of use of verbal or nonverbal interactions or in the mean length of utterance. (Author)

Data on the conservation of discontinuous quantity are analyzed according to two different criteria: judgment only and judgment plus explanation. The results are discussed in terms of Piagetian theory and particularly of the assumption that language development is a consequence, and not a cause, of cognitive development. (Author/KC)

Determined verbal response styles of four different groups of counselors: Black and White males and females. Blacks used more active expression skills with greater frequency than Whites. Whites used more attending skills. While race was a source of strong effect, there was a relative absence of significant sex differences. (Author)

Evaluates and describes a training program to improve verbal communication skills in slightly retarded eleven-year-olds. Students described objects to a listener, watched demonstrations of effective communication, and received evaluations of their communication. The program was effective in teaching these children to describe salient features…

Research indicates that the use of volunteer subjects in experiments involving motor performance may result in a selection bias and treatment interaction on certain tasks. (CJ)

Seeks to determine (1) whether 11- and 13-month-old infants directed their eye fixations to the referent of an object word said by the mother, and (2) whether there was a developmental shift in responding to object words at these two ages. Controls were set for response bias, stimulus preference, and maternal cuing. (Author/RH)