This article draws from the insights offered by discourse analysis and the study of gesture to examine imagination as a product of, and resource for, social action. Using data collected during ethnographic fieldwork at an architecture firm, the article explores how imagining can emerge from a group of interactants who use many semiotic media,…

This study investigated gender differences in communication effectiveness between popular and unpopular 5- to 7-year-old children. Because previous research suggests that there may be gender differences in how popular and unpopular children communicate with each other, 24 same-gender pairs (each containing a popular and an unpopular child) were…

The assessment of language laterality by the dichotic fused-words test may be impaired by interference effects revealed by the dominant report of one member of the stimuli-pair. Stimulus-dominance and ear asymmetry were evaluated in normal population (48 subjects of both sex and handedness) and in 2 patients with a single functional hemisphere.…

This study examined strategies for initiating social interactions with peers, among 4 children with hearing impairment, aged 33 to 36 months, attending a special early education center or a regular kindergarten. The study investigated initiation type (related to partner's hearing status) and rates of initiation success/failure vis-a-vis hearing…

Too little theory and research has considered the effects of communicating statistics in various forms on comprehension, perceptions of evidence quality, or evaluations of message persuasiveness. In a considered extension of Subjective Message Construct Theory (Morley, 1987), we advance a rationale relating evidence form to the formation of…

Lately, many studies have suggested that communication impairments in brain-damaged individuals might be explained--at least in part--in terms of cognitive resource allocation. Reproducing a clinical pattern in normal subjects by using a dual-task treatment might be a way of evaluating the role of cognitive resources in the right hemisphere's…

The purpose of this exploratory study was to investigate the impact of writing during mathematical problem solving. The study involved an analysis of ninth grade algebra students' written and verbal descriptions of their mathematical problem solving processes. Through this comparison, a better understanding of the connection between problem…

Background: The superiority of language and communication skills in children and adults with Williams syndrome (WS) is currently being debated. Whilst there have been a number of reports of precursors of language in WS in children who have already developed language, there have not been many studies that have prospectively investigated precursors…

This paper analyzes autism as a contingency-shaped disorder of verbal behavior. Contingencies of reinforcement in effect during the first to third year of a child's life may operate to establish and maintain those behaviors that later result in a diagnosis of autism. While neurobiological variables may, in some cases, predispose some children to…

The article presents findings from a comprehensive study of oral corrective feedback involving 207 classroom learners of English as a foreign language at different age and proficiency levels who elicited 1700 instances of corrective feedback. The study showed that those who are corrected profit from the correction in about 50% of all cases, as…

Seventy-two 2-year-olds participated in a study designed to test two competing accounts of the effect of contextual change on children's ability to learn a word for an object. The mechanistic account hypothesizes that any change in context that highlights a target object will lead to word learning; the social-pragmatic account maintains that a…

The bulk of the existing literature emphasizes the use of phonemic/phonetic based instruction to enhance generalization between reading and written language. However, phonetically irregular words are common in English and may require the use of whole word approaches. This study examined generalization between from reading to spelling and from…

Effectiveness of a self-monitoring procedure was evaluated for increasing work task completion and verbal requesting in two young adult men with autism and severe mental retardation. The study was conducted in a vocational training program at times when the men were expected to complete vocational tasks independently. A changing criterion design…

This report summarizes evaluation results for AISD's federally-funded Title IV safe and drug-free schools program activities for the 2007-2008 school year.

The goal of this multi-method study was to examine how child gender and coparenting processes influence associations between family stress and toddlers' social adjustment. The participants, 104 dual-earner couples and their 2-year-old children, were videotaped in their home during a freeplay activity. Mothers and fathers completed questionnaires…