The study examined an approach to train three adolescents with moderate mental handicaps to use the conversational skills of initiating a topic and continuing the conversation by cueing an adult listener to speak. The instructional techniques of modeling, prompting, delay, and social reinforcement were used in intervention. A single subject…

As part of a 5-year investigation of skill generalization in severely handicapped students, a literature review was undertaken within each of three general approaches: performance pattern studies, ecological studies, and self-control studies. The first paper, "Descriptive Analysis of Extant Research Literature concerning Skill Generalization…

This study reports the development of a sentence preference test designed to contrast tendencies to abstract, generalise and particularise in thinking. (Editor)

The study investigated maintenance of responding by four severely to moderately mentally retarded persons (12 to 16 years old) in a community living center who were taught methods of exiting the house in fire emergency situations. Training included instructions, modeling, behavioral rehearsal, social and tangible external reinforcement, and self…

The purpose of this study was to determine the influence and the relative salience of imagery and contextual cues in the mediation of preschoolers' emotional stereotypes. Fourteen male and 14 female preschoolers enrolled in a university summer preschool program were presented with six hypothetical emotional situations in story form -- 2 each for…

Internal validity is described as a matter of how well a particular instance of data collection or generation can be described and explained. It is a property of the procedures used in the collection or generation of data. The notion of internal validity is examined in order to establish a method of quantitatively estimating it. A coefficient of…

Three mentally retarded adult residents of a group home were trained to read survival words in four conditions (in the group home with one trainer; in the group home with two to three trainers; one trainer in the group home and the natural environment; and two to three trainers in the group home and the natural environment). Training was…

This study was designed to answer two questions: Will the percentage of utility for a group of phonic generalizations in a college-level vocabulary sample be similar to generalizations in a primary-level sample? Will qualitative differences in the types of phonic generalizations be apparent? A 1,495-word sample was selected from George Feinstein's…

This study is one of several conducted by the authors in their investigation of the use of "higher order rules" in the solution of problems. The focus of the current experiment was determination of the compatibility of identified rules with the knowledge of average teenagers, and of the extent to which instruction in higher order rules…

The present study examined Mexican-American and white subjects' response to same race stimulus persons who were differentiated only by the similarity of their beliefs to the subjects' beliefs. The prediction that a stimulus person whose beliefs are unknown and who is the same race as the subject would be responded to as if he had beliefs similar…

This paper develops a stimulus selection theory, based on an extensive review of previous research, which gives weight to context change or stimulus generalization decrement. The theory assumes no special compounding or configurational process, and accounts for the learning of successive discriminations without the addition of any special process.…

A series of pilot experiments were carried out to investigate the influence of stress induced by load and interference on the acquisition and retention of a path finding skill, and to investigate the relationship between two path finding strategies--retention of strings of instructions and understanding of global relationships--as components of…