The effects of three classes of reinforcing stimuli were compared across three students with profound intellectual disabilities. A multielement design with no baseline and final "best treatments" phase was used to measure the frequency of single-switch activations by each student across treatments. The three interventions were Treatment A, adapted…

This report is the outcome of an attempt to relate what may be called the "Le Pagean view of competence" to a linguistic community very different from that which gave rise to the concept. While upholding the general principles, the paper contends that the methodology elaborated for work in fluid creole communities may not be universally…

The purpose of the document is to assess facilitating and interfering effects of various strategies in samples of children from elementary and high school grade levels. Participating in the paired-associate study were 160 children, 40 each from first, third, sixth, and eleventh grades. Subjects were required to learn a 36-item aurally presented…

Research evidence indicates that racial awareness, including differential preference based on such an awareness, is quite pervasive and develops very early in life. In an effort to investigate the existence of racial awareness as manifested in differential preference in preschool children, this two-part study was conducted. In part one, 40 objects…

Fifty two Negro and 52 white second graders were asked to associate to each of 18 nonsense syllables verbally presented by one of two Negro or one of two white examiners. No examiner race differences were obtained. While significant subject race differences occurred in six of 15 response categories, each resulted from either the idiosyncratic…

Verbal responses of 50 college freshmen were compared to determine whether any differences existed between the types of responses given by students listed as high or low in verbal ability according to the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). The students, from two colleges, were tested individually using an experimenter-devised language inventory which…

A semantic differential measure of the attributions of the term feminist was developed and administered to 768 college students. Principal components analysis resulted in five factors: general evaluation, behavioral characteristics, political orientation, sexual preference, and gender classification. Internal replication and stability of the…

Reports on three experiments that do the following: 1) investigate the motivational and reinforcing structure underlying male sex role action in a three-person (a female and two males) exchange; and 2) contribute new information on females' interpersonal evaluation of males expressing masculine sex typed and androgynous sex role orientation. (MW)

Examined effects of unexpected behavioral information on person impressions. Inconsistency was manipulated with respect to Implicit Personality Theory. Found that behaviors with inconsistent evaluation implications did not affect impressions and that effects of inconsistent information depended on dimension of contrast, valence of initial…

With 101 healthy aging adult participants, the authors investigated whether executive functions are a unitary concept. The authors established the factor structure of the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST; E. A. Berg, 1948), the Stroop color and word test (C. J. Golden, 1978), verbal fluency using the Controlled Oral Word Association Test (COWAT;…

A study of the effects on responses to a word association task of varying the modality of the input of the stimulus word was used as a means of doing step-wise analysis of word association data. Subjects were 70 males and 70 females randomly selected from adult basic education classes in the Atlanta, Georgia, area and assigned to one of the…

The lack of standardization in research involving pictorial variables has made it difficult to clarify the functions of pictorial stimuli in learning. This study sought to determine whether selected methods of rendering pictorial illustrations influenced the number and type of descriptive words evoked in a verbal association task. Normally the…

Presents an exploratory study on the connotations of certain French words for a mixed-culture group of French teachers. This study indicated that many connotations were shared by nonnative-speaker as well as native-speaker group members. This phenomenon can be explained in terms of both encyclopedic knowledge and multiple group identities. (13…

A picture can be interpreted in different ways by various persons. There is often a difference between a picture's denotation (literal meaning), connotation (associative meaning), and private associations. Two studies were conducted in order to observe the private associations that pictures awaken in people. One study deals with associations made…