Williams syndrome (WS) is a neurodevelopmental genetic disorder often described as being characterized by a dissociative cognitive architecture, in which profound impairments of visuo-spatial cognition contrast with relative preservation of linguistic, face recognition and auditory short-memory abilities. This asymmetric and dissociative cognition…

This article presents the authors' reply to Rod Ellis's comments on their study on motivated classroom behavior. As Ellis correctly summarizes, the three student variables selected for investigation in the authors' study were attention, participation, and volunteering for teacher-fronted activity. These three components were then summed up in a…

Purpose: The purposes were (a) to compare masking of consonant bursts by adjacent vowels for listeners with and without hearing loss and (b) to determine the extent to which the temporal intraspeech masking can be reduced by a simulated hearing-aid frequency-response shaping. Method: Fourteen adults with sensorineural hearing loss and 10 with…

This study examines 16-month-olds' understanding of word order and inflectional properties of familiar nouns and verbs. Infants preferred grammatical sentences over ungrammatical sentences when the ungrammaticality was cued by both misplaced inflection and word order reversal of nouns and verbs. Infants were also sensitive to inflection alone as a…

"Selective mutism" is the term used to describe a disorder in which a person speaks only in restricted stimulus situations. Examination of single-subject research concerning selective mutism reveals the most popular and successful interventions to instate speech involve a combination of behavior modification procedures. The present research…

Word associations to 51 stimulus words selected from the Kent and Rosanoff stimulus list were obtained from 110 graduate and 75 undergraduate teacher trainees. Associations were analyzed so that comparisons between teacher-trainee associations and several adult normative collections could be made. Response homogeneity was found to increase…

The results of this study indicated a correspondence between selected categories of therapist verbalizations, ordered in terms of stimulus specificity and the amplitude of his patient's autonomic arousal. A similar relationship was found between the therapist's level of autonomic arousal in response to his own categorized verbalizations. (Author)

Juniors in three high schools were selected for the study. Findings: (1) Both reinforcement groups were effective in reducing students' feelings of alienation; (2) There were no significant differences between effects of model reinforcement and verbal reinforcement counseling; (3) There was no interaction between counselors and treatments or…

Investigates the effects of varying the motivational context of verbal rationales on children's compliance with prohibition. Results indicate that children who received other-oriented rationales performed a greater amount of work and were less likely to show decrements in working over time than did subjects who received self-oriented rationales.…

This study investigated novel word acquisition by 18- and 24-month-old children in the context of adult referential behavior independent of variations in salience. Findings suggest that 24-month olds use referential intent of the speaker to learn new words, but when learning, they may have a less secure grasp on the meaning of speakers'…