Children's ability to infer dominant or subordinate status of speakers from their requests was investigated. It was hypothesized that, for young children, syntactic indirectness, semantic softness, and a positive tone, in the absence of other cues, would serve as cues to indicate that a speaker is subordinate to a listener. Syntactic directness,…

Research on self-disclosure has suggested that in dyadic social interactions, self-disclosure by one member of the dyad tends to be reciprocated by the other. Little is known, however, about the parameters of self-disclosure and reciprocity. Investigators have sought to relate self-disclosure to various personality constructs, such as…

More than 5,000 reading miscues by 96 eighth and ninth graders were analyzed in a study designed to define specific relationships among cue use and to extend research based on Kenneth Goodman's psycholinguistic theory to the secondary level. The students read two easy and two difficult passages orally and answered questions based on them. Each…

College undergraduates participated in a cost/benefit analysis and a speed/accuracy analysis of semantic priming in a lexical decision task. In both studies, half the cues were neutral and half were words from 30 semantic categories. Word targets were the category names, and nonword targets were derived from those names. The cue-word was valid 80%…

Two experiments, based on the semantic differential technique, were designed to measure the tolerance level of bilingually marked English in a functional bilingual's speech. In the first experiment, marked syntactic cues were rated by different groups of judges as generally indicative of non-bilingualism, although on the whole they were not…

The usefulness of intact (topic outline format) and embedded (positioned within text) headings as processing aids to facilitate recall was examined, using a 2,500-word passage from introductory science textbooks. Prior studies were subject to criticisms which this study attempted to correct, specifically: (1) use of non-optimal dependent measures;…

A study was conducted to determine which of three major cue systems (linguistic, cognitive, or extralinguistic) 146 subjects at the kindergarten, first grade and second grade levels used to reconstruct meaning when confronted with a reading task. Cue system utilization was related to four factors: modality (listening versus reading), reading…

Two studies, both part of a research program based on a theory of clinical problem solving behavior, used a computer to simulate a clinician interacting with a child having reading difficulties. The impact of routine cue collection on a clinician's performance is the focus of the first study; the process of hypothesis generation as it is affected…

Several different issues in the temporal coding of words were subjected to experimental analysis. Two experiments evaluated three response measures (recency judgments, position judgments, lag judgments) used to index temporal coding. Lag judgments were found to be of little use; subjects could make valid position and recency judgments without…

Twenty-two subjects were asked to generate fifty numbers from 0 to 100 at ten second intervals. These subjects were then taught to imagine a pleasant scene or an aversive scene on cue from the experimenter. After practice imagining these scenes, subjects were again requested to give fifty numbers between 0 and 100. Group I was cued to imagine the…

The mnemonic consequences of semantic, acoustic, and orthographic encoding and the relationships between encoding and retrieval cues were investigated in an incidental-learning experiment involving 24 first-, third-, and fifth-grade pupils. Each child was asked one orienting question for each of 18 words; the questions differed in the type of…

Preschool children were presented with conflicting cues in order to assess the importance of pointing, verbalizing, and looking by adults in directing the attention of children. The study involved two procedures: first, the experimenter indicated by pointing, verbalizing, or looking whether a big or little bead was to be put on a string by the…

Experiment I was designed to demonstrate that young children fail to abstract the positive cue as the relevant stimulus event in a restricted concept-learning task. Sixteen kindergarten and 16 fourth grade subjects were trained to criterion on a Kendler-type task, whereupon each subject was presented a pair of new instances which contrasted only…

Nursery school children (N=64) received seven tests of conservation of number which varied in the type and number of perceptual supports for conservation. Most of the tests with these supports facilitated performance in comparison to the standard conservation test. Conservation appeared earlier than usual. There were significant effects of…

The combined theories of cue summation and stimulus generalization provide the theoretical model for this study. First, the study attempted to determine if supplementing a theoretical presentation of rhetorical principles with printed, audio, and audiovisual speech models would contribute to a significant increase in learning as evidence by…