A central question in online human sentence comprehension is, "How are linguistic relations established between different parts of a sentence?" Previous work has shown that this dependency resolution process can be computationally expensive, but the underlying reasons for this are still unclear. This article argues that dependency…

Comprehension of an illustrated document can involve complex visual scanning in order to locate the relevant information on the screen when this is evoked in spoken explanations. The present study examined the effects of two types of attention-guiding means (color change or step-by-step presentation of diagram elements synchronized with a spoken…

Objective: Two studies examined whether accessibility of hostility-related schema influenced ratings of ambiguous child pictures. Based on the social information processing model of child physical abuse (CPA), it was expected that CPA risk status would serve as a proxy for chronic accessibility of hostile schema, while priming procedures were used…

Patients with conduction aphasia have been characterized as having a short-term memory deficit that leads to relative difficulty on span and repetition tasks. It has also been observed that these same patients often get the gist of what is said to them, even if they are unable to repeat the information verbatim. To study this phenomenon…

A group of 21 kindergarten and first grade children who displayed low baseline rates of donating pennies to help a needy peer were exposed to instructional prompts to donate and praise for each donation. (JMB)

Article focused on R. L. Gregory's theory of distortion illustions and his defense of that theory. (RK)

To examine the difference in attention capacity when reading difficult or easy text, a study presented text that varied in difficulty to 22 subjects via a computer monitor. The text was presented in a self-paced manner, one word at a time. Reading times for each word were obtained by computing latencies between key presses. Whenever a flashing…

Describes three delayed-response experiments which tested two- and three-year-old children's memories for location of a hidden object under several combinations of spatial and pictorial cue availability and emphasis. (Author/JMB)

A statistical technique is proposed for comparing an empirically obtained matrix of the perceived similarity of paired stimuli against a set of distinctive features that supposedly characterize the stimuli on which the matrix is based. The statistical development of the technique and an example are presented. (Author/JKS)

The Adapted Cuing Technique (ACT) was created to accompany oral stimulus presentation in treatment of dyspraxia. ACT is consistent with current treatment theory, emphasizing patterns of articulatory movement, manner of production, and multimodality facilitation. A case study describes the use of ACT in the treatment of a five-year-old child.…

Ten autistic children and 10 normal nursery school children, matched for mean developmental age, were presented with figure stimuli and had variable irrelevant cues in two-choice simultaneous discrimination learning. Performance of the autistic group did not vary as a function of irrelevant variability, a result attributed to poor performance of…

When 60 five-year-old and 48 10-year-old children heard three stories, each containing three target objects from each of three taxonomic categories, younger children received greater benefit than older children from strongly scripted story presentations and from constrained category-cue and script-cue retrieval conditions. Cues and the extent to…

Fifteen undergraduates were trained to identify abstract forms in response to manual sign, CVC (consonant vowel consonant) sense syllables, or combined manual sign plus CVC nonsense syllables. Results suggest that facilitative effects of manual sign labels upon comprehension may be due to the iconic relationship between signs and their referents.…

Discusses research showing that material people learn when in a high arousal state and material they learn when in a normal arousal state is subsequently best recalled when they are in a similar arousal state. Speculates that this effect may partially underlie mood cuing, mood-related material from memory. (EKN)