Professional roles in early childhood special education (ECSE) are expanding beyond traditional frameworks of direct service, to include consultation services, program planning and evaluating, and marketing. Potential dangers of role conflict and role overload are noted. (Author/DB)

This paper highlights research, development, and applications of technology in the areas of visual perception, facilitation of human communication, prosthetics and orthotics, and robotics and signal processing. Means by which the application of promising technological developments can be expedited are also discussed. (Author/DB)

Male and female students are culturally shaped in their reading and writing strategies. Men and women college students are more likely to be successful learners if they can examine the ways in which reading and writing are culturally defined for them and integrate that information into classroom activities. (MSE)

Notes that many activities in early childhood classrooms offer opportunities for sensory learning that may be overlooked unless specific attention is directed toward these areas of learning. Suggests that teachers can increase these opportunities by using "feely" boxes or bags, which allow children to touch an object without seeing it. Various…

Examined the word-letter phenomenon using computational studies that focus on the contextual guidance of learning and processing in multistream nets. (32 references) (CK)

Investigates the incidence of segmental and prosodic contrasts in recorded sentence materials and the use of such distinctions in the processing of utterances. The chosen materials involve sites of parsing ambiguity. Results show that in the immediate interpretation of spoken language input, intonational contrasts function as clear structural…

This study explains the methodology of clique analysis and presents a study in which the use of clique analysis demonstrated that an employee with severe disabilities was perceived by co-workers as socially involved in the work setting at levels comparable to others in such areas as greetings and small talk, work-related conversation, and personal…

This commentary on the article by Jones and Smith in this issue examines whether coherent conceptual cores exist in long-term memory; abstract propositions constitute conceptual cores; concepts in long-term memory control behavior; and the primary purpose of developing and using concepts is to taxonomize the environment. (TJQ)

Reviews "An Odyssey in Learning and Perception" (E. J. Gibson), a volume of collected works that present a first-hand account of many advances in psychology over the past 60 years. A discussion of the two basic questions that capture the essence of Gibson's research, "What is learned" and "What is information" is…

Describes a study which linked the misconduct of proposing, performing, and reporting academic research to librarians' perceptions of service quality; explores implications of fraud for library collections and information services; and discusses factors meriting further research. Tables present examples of sources in which those implicated in…

Three experiments explored preschoolers' developing knowledge of stable (identity, gender, and race), changeable (mood, weight, and health), and changeable-but-irreversible (age and height) characteristics when knowledge of those characteristics was tested verbally rather than pictorially. Found that children make systematic rather than random…

Teachers of 41 students with reading difficulties and learning disability/emotional disturbance tracked student progress toward reading goals using curriculum-based measurement techniques. Students did not increase their academic self-concept or awareness of the teacher's involvement or interactions with them but were more knowledgeable about…

Studied children's transitive inference where representation of premises provided contradictory information depending on position of two elements in a A, B, C series. Eight-year olds did significantly better on the more complex problems than did six-year olds, suggesting the presence of a developmental sequence of algorithms that enable children…

Examined the possibility that auditory stimuli with properties of adult-to-infant speech are more detectable in a noisy ambient environment than ones that resemble adult-to-adult speech. Findings suggests that properties that characterize adult-to-infant speech may compensate for young infants' low-frequency deficits and therefore facilitate the…

Analysis of survey responses from 42 families of infants/toddlers with special needs found that both mothers and fathers desired involvement in the child's early intervention program and that their major perceived need was for information. However, differences were found between fathers' and mothers' preferred formats for receiving information.…