Presents an acoustical model and evidence from four experiments that children with visual impairments use the buildup of low-frequency sound along walls to guide locomotion. The model differs from the concept of echolocation by emphasizing sound that is ambient, rather than self-produced, and of low frequency. (Author/CR)

Investigated the picture naming skills of dyslexic children, poor comprehenders and children with normally-developing reading skills, using pictures with names that varied in word length and frequency. Relative to young children reading at the same level, dyslexic children were less accurate naming pictures that have long names, and they made a…

Focuses on nonverbal and extralinguistic activities as an aide to learning. Body language, movement, and action, simultaneously simple and omnipresent, are useful at the level of comprehension. These activities suggest images or result from verbal instigation. This visual imagery fills in the gaps between one's mother tongue and a foreign…

Comparison by 40 users of 2 technologies--Verbal Landmark and Talking Signs--that provide speech messages to hand-held receivers for blind travelers found that, on all measures, the Talking Signs system proved superior to the Verbal Landmark system. This was attributed to Verbal Landmark's more cognitively demanding technology. (DB)

Three experiments tested the ability of 11 children (ages 6-10) with low vision to recall black-and-white line drawings. Unlike fully sighted age-matched controls, children with low vision recalled best when left to study pictures without verbal intervention. They also named significantly fewer of the remembered pictures correctly. (Author/PB)

Examines the ability of infants to track and anticipate the final orientation of an object. Subjects were infants ranging from an average of four months to eight months old. Three experiments, with the last one as control, were carried out. Concludes that infants show some rudimentary mental rotation from four months of age. (MOK)

Examined the effect of functional values of stimuli on orienting response elicitation. Subjects were 50 4-month-old infants and were randomly assigned to 1 of 3 experimental conditions. Results suggested the importance of taking into account the functional value of stimuli when analyzing infant attention. (MOK)

Discusses the potential for visualization of metadata and metadata-based surrogates, including a command interface for metadata viewing, site mapping and data aggregation tools, dynamic derivation of surrogates, and a reintroduction of transient hypergraphs from the tradition of cocitation networking. Addresses digital library research into…

Tangible preference assessments were compared with verbal preference assessments for six individuals (ages 15-20) with mental retardation, behavior disorders, or both. The two assessments yielded similar high-preference items for 4 of the 6 participants. The verbal assessment was typically completed in less time than the tangible assessment.…

Examines the performance of expressive dynamic variations by advanced pianists in an aural modeling performance task. Indicates that the performer's identification of dynamic features and their incorporation into a performance goal influenced expressive performance of dynamic variations. Subjects who identified features played nonidiomatic…

Examined whether 6-month-olds expect people to behave differently toward persons and inanimate objects. Found that infants habituated to an actor talking to something hidden behind an occluder looked longer at an object, whereas infants habituated to an actor reaching and swiping looked longer at a person. No difference in looking at stimuli was…

Investigated whether individual and developmental differences in look duration were correlated with latency to disengage fixation from a visual stimulus for 3- and 4-month olds. Found that look duration was correlated with disengagement latency. Three-month olds showed slower latencies than 4-month olds. Long-looking infants showed greater…

Used event-related dense-sensor EEG recording techniques to examine the time course of language switching during a visually-cued naming task in which bilingual participants named digits in either their first or second language. Switch-related modulation of ERP components was evident over parietal and frontal cortices, and in the latter case showed…

Preschoolers viewed stimulus sets comprised of a sample picture and three types of matches and were asked to choose a match that "went with" each sample. Children's choices indicated that a shift occurs between 3 and 4 years of age from a taxonomic bias to a thematic bias. Animate sample stimuli enhanced children's tendency to adopt…

Trained 3-, 5-, and 8-year-olds in temporal bisection task, with nonstandard comparison stimuli spaced linearly between short or long standard visual stimuli. Statistical analyses and results from different theoretical models of the data all suggested that temporal sensitivity was higher in the 8-year-olds than in younger groups, even when the…