Three studies explored whether children's tendency to extend object names on the basis of sameness of shape (shape bias) is specific to naming. Findings indicated that 2- and 3-year-olds showed shape bias both when asked to extend a novel name and when asked to select an object of the same kind as a target object; 3-year-olds also showed shape…

Five studies examined preschoolers' understanding of linguistic form class and pragmatic context in presence of a single exemplar or multiexemplars. Data indicated that by 2 years, children use linguistic form class, and by age 3, use pragmatic context. Young children have begun to understand the distinction between generic and nongeneric noun…

Two time-delay conditions for teaching complex visual discriminations to 14 normal preschoolers, 12 with mild mental retardation, and 11 with moderate mental retardation were compared. Results indicated that for all populations and stimuli, time delay of multiple dynamic distinctive-feature prompts produced learning, while time delay of the single…

A traditional cued recall task and an item recognition priming paradigm were used to assess the locus of associative memory difficulties in learning-disabled children. Results for 24 learning-disabled and 24 nondisabled sixth graders are discussed within the explicit and implicit memory framework of P. Graf and D. L. Schacter (1985). (TJH)

Considers pressure, volume, entropy, temperature, Helmholtz free energy, Gibbs free energy, enthalpy, and internal energy. Suggests the mnemonic diagram is for use with simple systems that are defined as macroscopically homogeneous, isotropic, uncharged, and chemically inert. (MVL)

Tactile cues were provided to a 19-year-old deaf, blind, and mentally retarded individual to guide her performance on packaging tasks. The tactile prompts effectively guided her on the training task and were also generalized to novel tasks and cues. Continued use of the cues was necessary to maintain performance. (Author/JDD)

Describes a study that examined the effects of different kinds of cues (unrestricted, bibliographic and structural) on the recall of a text. Results are analyzed by the degree to which protocol vocabulary matched index terms and propositions from the article. Implications for known-item retrieval and the design of information system interfaces are…

Younger (N=24) and older subjects (N=24) generated one or three properties to set of 40 nouns. Subjects received incidental recall test immediately after, 1 week after, or 3 weeks after generation. Younger subjects recalled more nouns than did older subjects in all conditions, although both age groups exhibited high immediate recall. (Author/ ABL)

Examines the performance of normal and disabled readers in recognizing whether orally presented letter strings represent real words. Finds that disabled readers have difficulty in making available the full range of semantic cues when processing stimuli in an acoustic form, supporting a verbal-processing deficit hypothesis of reading disability.…

The study found that use of the Dial-A-Phone instructional package plus a least intrusive prompt teaching strategy was more effective than the prompts alone in training two adults with moderate developmental disabilities to match digits of personal phone numbers with digits on a dial telephone. (Author/DB)

Hearing-impaired speechreaders use linguistic context to compensate for the poor visibility of some speech movements. Constraints on spoken language enhance speechreading performance and help compensate for the paucity of sensory data. The largest effects come from linguistic constraints imposed by sentence context--syntactic, semantic, and…

Twenty-two subjects with autism were tested on three perspective-taking tasks. Subjects were successful on two tasks that required them to make relatively direct connections between eating and hunger or visual access and knowledge. They failed a task which used stimuli of a more transient nature and less predictable reactions of the protagonists.…

Six-month-old infants recognize a cue 24 hours after training in the original context but not in a different one. It is demonstrated that this retrieval deficit could be overcome if infants are briefly and passively exposed to a novel context. Concludes that each training episode is encoded in terms of the context in which it occurs. Contains 48…

This study investigated the use of the Task Demonstration Model (TDM) with 3 groups of students (ages 16-21) with severe or moderate retardation and compared it with the Standard Prompting Hierarchy. Percent and rate of correct responses indicate that TDM can be effective in a concurrent model of group instruction. (Author/JDD)

A genre analysis of 284 essay examination prompts reveals specific discoursal characteristics that function to communicate what type of response will be considered legitimate. The finding suggests that, for test-takers to decode prompts, they must draw from the same functional/linguistic knowledge of genre that the test constructor did. (15…