Imaginative play can enhance preschoolers' oral language when the child's internal control is strenghtened, external reality is suspended, and motivation exists to become involved. The caregiver provides cues in the arrangement of the environment and selection of materials. Cues can encourage dramatic as well as sociodramatic play. (CL)

Recall performance of 84 mildly retarded adolescents and 84 nonretarded fourth graders was compared under various encoding conditions. Results indicated generally comparable levels of recall performance for retarded and nonretarded Ss. However, retarded Ss were less responsive to sort and experimenter cue conditions, which led to increased recall…

Two experiments tested the effectiveness of familiar size as information for perceiving distance. In the first experiment, under monocular viewing conditions, adults judged the distances to large and small photographs of faces and to large and small checkerboard ovals equal to the faces in size. In the second, the same displays were presented to…

Discusses the theory that the effect of repetition is greater when memory for an earlier presentation of the repeated item is less accessible. Describes experiments revealing interactions between the spacing of repetitions and the similarity of repetitions, the type of intervening material and cue effectiveness. (EKN)

The relationship between cue differentiation and interference was investigated in three paired-associate recall experiments. It was concluded that discriminative coding is sufficient to eliminate interference resulting from cue confusion during associative learning, but that discriminative coding is not a necessary consequence of associative…

An approach is described for the characterization of test questions in terms of the information in a passage relevant to answering them and the nature of the relationship of this information to the questions. The approach offers several advantages over previous algorithms for the production of test items. (Author/GDC)

Both the directions and the directions plus reinforcement groups increased subjects' time on the task during the experimental phases. When extrinsic reinforcement and directions were removed, they maintained intrinsically motivated behaviors at levels significantly above levels observed during the baseline phase and significantly higher than the…

First, third, and fifth graders hid a series of "people pictures" in containers, half of which bore picture cues related to the people's societal roles and half of which bore cues unrelated to the people's roles. Aspects of their memory-for-location were then analyzed by grade level. (Author/JMB)

Investigated the effect of phrase structure priming on sentence production latencies. Demonstrated the priming effects to be short lived. This finding contrasts with more persistent effects recently demonstrated in off-line picture description tasks. (Author/VWL)

Reports priming experiments that examined production of inflected forms. Participants produced words out of small sets in response to prompts. Results are interpreted in terms of a slot-and-filler model of word production in which inflectional frames on one hand and stems and affixes on the other are independently spelled out on the basis of an…

In 2 experiments, learners who were seated at a computer workstation received a narrated animation about lightning formation. Then, they took a retention test, a transfer test, and rated the speaker. The results are consistent with social agency theory, which posits that social cues in multimedia messages can encourage learners to interpret…

Proposes that cues to action are important influences on self-protective behaviors (i.e., bicycle helmets for safety). Interviews parents of children between the ages of 5 and 18. Indicates that cues to action affect perceptions of threat but are unrelated to attitudes, intentions, or behaviors. (PA)

Investigated the effects of of distance on perception of unimodal visual speech and congruent and incongruent forms of the syllables /ba/, /bi/, /ga/, and /gi/. Identification of unimodal visual speech was unaffected by increasing distance to 10m, but was impaired at 20 and 30m. (Author/VWL)

This study used a counterbalanced alternating-treatments design with a blind or sighted speech-language pathologist/facilitator. Analysis revealed that two students with autism responded more accurately when the facilitator could see in spite of the fact that she did not think she was influencing their responding and did not intentionally do so.…

Details BootLex, a model using distributional cues to build a lexicon and achieving significant segmentation results with English, Japanese, and Spanish; child- and adult-directed speech, and written text; and variations in coding structure. Compares BootLex with three groups of computational models of the infant segmentation process. Discusses…