This study concerns a moment in the learning process which is considered crucial, namely, that point when the learner is confronted with the necessity of discovering from the models already learned and stored in memory elements that will be useful in constructing a new utterance or solving a new problem. The emphasis is on the point of connection…

Intended for parents and teachers, the manual offers guidelines for developing communication skills in severely and profoundly mentally handicapped children. An introduction helps the reader determine a suitable starting point and provides a description of early communication skills; Part II describes the five stages in communication development.…

Previous research has shown a similar starting time for early combinations of words and play actions in children and has suggested that similar cognitive processes underlie the transition to combining activities in language, symbolic play, and manipulative play. A study was undertaken to investigate combining activities in these three domains and…

Interest is focused on the relationship between how old a person is when he or she first begins to learn a language and the fluency with which he or she can produce and understand that language in adulthood. The goal is to describe and measure the relationship between early experience and environment in language learning. In particular, the…

A study used children's definitions to explore the culture of the classroom from the perspective of the child. Definitions for school-related terms were elicited from first graders in two classrooms of a public elementary school in the Chicago metropolitan area. After having been acclimated to the presence of the researchers, the students were…

One of 10 documents developed for preschool programs for handicapped children, the parent activity catalog is a selection of activities suitable for parent volunteers to do with preschool children in a nursery school setting and is intended to supplement the Parent Volunteer System Manual which describes ways to utilize parents in the classroom.…

The paper addresses the nature of the physical environment of classrooms for young handicapped children. Research is cited on the factors important in successful interventions in five areas (sample subtopics in parentheses): social interaction (materials that promote interaction, staff-child ratios); language learning (importance of engaging…

Intended to help instructors of introductory psychology courses, this publication contains lectures given at the 1980 meeting of the American Psychological Association in Montreal, Canada. There are five papers. The first paper examines the literature on learning and memory in terms of a model focusing on biological and cognitive constraints on…

Ninety-seven developmentally disabled mentally retarded persons (aged 10 to 48 years) living in an institution, in group homes, or at home were trained in environmental language, speech, and reading skills using a game oriented multisensory approach. The evening tutorial program consisted of 20 sessions over a 6 month period. A pedagogic and task…

Vocabulary test errors made by people with varying levels of vocabulary knowledge might give information about the stages involved in learning a word's meaning. A study used such data to evaluate Johnson O'Connor's proposal that word learning involves four stages and that each stage is characterized by a type of confusion (a mislead). In the first…

Three experiments were conducted to assess the effects of nonbizarre vs. bizarre pictorial elaboration on the paired-associate retention of noun pairs. Five and seven year old children served as subjects in the first two experiments and learned a list of common noun pairs by the study-test paired-associate method. Experiment 1 provided a…

The present study was conducted in order to evaluate pictorial elaboration effects in children's incidental paired-associate memory. The design of the experiment consisted of a 2 x 2 x 2 x 5 factorial with (1) grade level (kindergarten vs. second), (2) pictorial presentation (standard vs. elaborated), (3) list (two 14-pair lists of common noun…