Children and adults listened to stories that contained a goal sentence and an inconsistent outcome. Several encoding and retrieval factors were simultaneously manipulated in the stories. Interaction effects in situations with weak encoding constraint decreased with age. (BC)

This article focuses on the value of developing the skills involved in grouping text into syntactically appropriate units with students having reading problems. It suggests use of phrase-cued texts (in which phrase boundaries are explicitly marked) to move from word-by-word reading to reading in meaningful phrases. (DB)

Reviews the nature and functions of prosody, and contrasts English and Cantonese for this feature of language as background for two experimental studies. Thirty Cantonese advanced speakers of English were tested for their recognition memory of English sentences in which prosody-cued meaning contrasts in otherwise identical sentence pairs. Results…

A study evaluated the effectiveness of a teaching package (graduated guidance and visual activity schedules) in teaching four children (ages 7-8) with autism to increase on-task and on-schedule behavior. Student performance rose to criterion levels upon introduction of the graduated guidance procedures and maintained when the picture activity book…

Three experiments investigated 4-, 6-, and 8-month-olds' perception of the audible, visible, and combined attributes of bimodally specified syllables. Results suggested that at 4 months, infants attended primarily to the featural information, at 6 months primarily to the asynchrony, and at 8 months to both features independently. (Author/KB)

Reports on a study of how nonverbal cues during supervision affect Teaching English as a Second Language (TESL) graduate students' impressions of the trustworthiness of supervisors. Particular features of nonverbal communication during supervision were staged in video materials constructed specifically for the research. Students evaluated the…

A study combined communication book training, a milieu approach, and systematic vocabulary selection to teach a nonspeaking adolescent with mental retardation to communicate in three settings. Results indicated rapid learning of communication book use in meal preparation and employment training and more delayed increased in small group…

An instructional procedure to teach laundry skills to four high school students with moderate mental disabilities utilized least prompts with multiple exemplars of materials to facilitate generalization of skills across community settings and multiple exemplars of nontargeted information presented as instructive feedback. Students acquired and…

Three experiments examined characteristics of a stimulus-cueing retrieval from long-term memory for 3-month olds. Used mobiles displaying either Qs (feature-present stimuli) or Os (feature-absent stimuli) and tested 24 hours later. Findings indicated that target-distractor similarity constraints, whether or not a feature-present stimulus, would…

This article presents an overview of several pivotal response interventions. Areas discussed include responsivity to multiple cues, motivation to initiate and respond appropriately to social and environmental stimuli, and self-regulation of behaviors. The trend to streamline intervention by targeting behaviors that have a widespread effect on…

A study involving 6 children with autism investigated whether self-initiations might be associated with highly favorable post-intervention outcomes. Results found that children who had highly favorable outcomes exhibited more spontaneous self-initiations at pre-intervention. Further study indicated children could learn a variety of…

Examined in six experiments toddlers' use of syntactic cues to learn proper names and count nouns. Found that by 24 months, both girls and boys were significantly more likely to select a labeled object if they had heard a proper name than if they had heard a count noun. At 20 months, neither girls nor boys demonstrated this effect. (Author/KB)

We examine how attention to animacy information may contribute to children's developing knowledge of language. This research extends beyond prior research in that children were shown dynamic events with novel entities, and were asked not only to comprehend sentences but to use sentence structure to infer the meaning of a new word. In a 4 x 3…

In this article, the author discusses two strategies--visual cues (modeling) and verbal cues (short, accurate phrases) which are related to teaching motor skills in maximizing learning in physical education classes. Both visual and verbal cues are strong influences in facilitating and promoting day-to-day learning. Both strategies reinforce…

Background: This study investigated whether another person's social attention, specifically the direction of their eye gaze, and a non-social directional cue, an arrow, triggered reflexive orienting in children with and without autism in an experimental situation. Methods: Children with autism and typically developed children participated in one…