A 9-year-old with learning disabilities exhibiting speech and language delay was taught to illustrate his own picture prompt materials for learning basic sight words. Illustrating word meaning was first modeled for the participant. Subsequently, he illustrated the remaining target words. Rapid acquisition and retention of the target words…

Clarifies features of Smith et al.'s attentional learning account of object naming, arguing that Booth and Waxman's findings address tenets not in the attentional learning account while not addressing one of the central tenets of the attentional learning account. Suggests that the debate about the nature of children's language and cognition would…

Responds to Smith et al.'s work on relations between perceptual, conceptual, and linguistic knowledge in early word learning and discusses treatment of evidence. Asserts that Smith et al.'s commentary fails to engage data presented and their implications. Asserts that learners seamlessly integrate perceptual, linguistic, and conceptual information…

Three mentally handicapped students (aged 13, 36, and 40) with maladaptive speech received training to answer questions with verbal labels. The results of their cues-pause-point training showed that the students replaced their maladaptive speech with correct labels (answers) to questions in the training setting and three generalization settings.…

Two experiments examined visual cues as a means for four severely mentally retarded secondary-age students to order in fast-food restaurants. The experiments involved training in school-based simulated environments or in community restaurants. Use of the visual cues was quite effective and easily generalized. Previous experiments with similar…

A study found that statistically significant performance results were obtained by mentally handicapped learners (n=25) who used instructional cues such as color while attempting to learn a complex engine assembly task. (Author)

Examined role of counselors' manifest self-confidence on clients' perceptions and explored contribution of linguistic and paralinguistic cues to perceptions. College students (N=124) listened to audiotapes of counselor dialogue varied by counselor linguistic and paralinguistic self-confidence. Found that vocal, but not verbal, cues of…

Reports on the development and evaluation of a two-component mnemonic strategy for teaching hierarchical and specific botanical concepts. Reports that compared to traditional instruction, mnemonic instruction facilitates learning of both classification and characteristic information, as well as inferential thinking on a problem-solving task. (RS)

Ninety-six fifth-grade students studied a map of a fictitious island while twice listening to a related narrative with target feature and nonfeature items, cued by varying iconic and verbal stimuli in four map cue conditions. Memory for feature information and pictorial retrieval cues appeared to activate memory for nonfeature information. (SLD)

Reviews studies in which perceptual cue trading data have been compared with computational models and examines the perception of contrast between the voiceless fricative "s" and the voiceless affricate "ts." Nine subjects listened to a total of 6 tokens each of 193 stimuli and labeled each stimulus as containing either of the…

This study compared efforts of 20 deaf and 20 hearing infants to reengage their deaf or hearing mothers in a maternal "still-face" situation. When all kinds of infant signal behaviors were considered, few overall differences were found in eliciting efforts by deaf and hearing infants. (Author/DB)

Expert judgments of prompt difficulty in essay tests were examined to discover whether they could be used at the item-writing stage of test development. Findings show that "expert judges" share considerable agreement about prompt difficulty and prompt task type, but they cannot predict which prompts will result in high or low scores for…

Investigated whether women undergoing outpatient chemotherapy for breast cancer can develop classically conditioned emotional distress. Patients' responses to a distinctive stimulus were assessed in a location not associated with chemotherapy administration. Results supported hypothesis that pairing a distinctive stimulus with chemotherapy would…

This paper discusses guidelines for devising a hierarchy when fading response prompts in training individuals with developmental disabilities. Existing guidelines are seen as poorly defined, inconsistent, and lacking both theoretical and experimental support. An alternative theoretical account is proposed which suggests that prompts in a hierarchy…

This study evaluated a computer-assisted instructional program employing a constant time delay prompting procedure to teach spelling of abbreviations to four adolescents with mild learning disabilities. The program was found effective, and training generalized to hand-written performance in both a special and general education setting. (Author/DB)