Reviews four groups of research: (1) effects of pictures on children's reading comprehension; (2) effects of pictures on comprehension and accuracy; (3) effects of titles on comprehension; and (4) effects of titles and pictures on comprehension and accuracy. Important findings are that pictures and titles are not uniformly effective in all…

Neonates who were exposed to the same or different words on two consecutive days habituated to the sound on day one and recovered head turning on day two. Infants who heard the same word again on day two responded less well than infants exposed to the word for the first time on day two. (BC)

This study examined the process of communication within the professional-family relationship by identifying and describing the types and patterns of talk during interactions between 15 families of young children with developmental delays and their respective early interventionists. Videotaped interactions of routine home visits were coded using a…

This article investigated the role of the recognition criterion in the verbal overshadowing effect (VOE). In 3 experiments, people witnessed an event, verbally described a perpetrator, and then attempted identification. The authors found in Experiment 1, which included a "not present" response option and both perpetrator-present (PP) and…

In the fall of 2003, the authors corresponded on the topic of private events on the listserv of the Verbal Behavior Special Interest Group. Extracts from that correspondence raised questions about the role of response amplitude in determining units of analysis, whether private events can be investigated directly, and whether covert behavior…

The goal of the present study was to explore the emergence of verbal behavior resulting from the joint control of two antecedent stimuli that are presented together for the first time. Conditional discriminations were used for teaching and for probing. Four stimuli PI, P2, 0 1 , and 02 were samples and four stimuli Al, A2, BI, and B2 were the…

The aims of this study were (1) to assess the relative effectiveness of verbal and visual elaboration prompts and question-answering prompts on children's incidental memory, and (2) to determine whether performance improvement associated with pictorial elaboration could be augmented by either verbal elaboration or question-answering procedures.…

The short-term recall of word-triads was tested, comparing retention over three types of intervals within 24 preschoolers. Results suggest that the condition effect in short-term recall did not disrupt the long-term storage of the items. (Author/CS)

A prevalent theory about the cognitive aspect of humor is that most humorous stimuli are characterized by incongruity that is first perceived and then resolved. However, the combination of incongruity and resolution is not sufficient for constituting a joke--resolution should be inadequate as well. In other words, resolution is brought about by…

This paper reviews evidence that meaningful learning is facilitated by several imagery eliciting strategies including pictorial stimuli, concrete verbal stimuli, and imagery instructions. The review focuses on the conditions under which imagery eliciting strategies facilitate memory for prose or expository texts rather than for more simple…

A study involving three profoundly retarded adults was designed to investigate the efficacy of a stair step diagonal training progression in promoting correct responses to untrained action-object verbal instructions. Procedures included pretraining assessment of action verbs and nouns, matrix training in which each S was physically put through the…

THIS IS AN EXTENSION OF A PSYCHOLINGUISTIC STUDY BEGUN IN 1966 INVOLVING WORD ASSOCIATION NORMS. THE FIRST EXPERIMENT ANALYZED IN TERMS OF FREQUENCY TABLES VERB AND OBJECT RESPONSES TO SUBJECT-NOUNS IN A DECLARATIVE SENTENCE FRAME, WITH THE LIMITATION THAT IT WAS DIFFICULT TO DETERMINE WHICH OBJECTS WERE ASSOCIATED WITH WHICH VERBS. THIS SECOND…

A CONTINUATION OF A STUDY OF PUPILS' ABILITY TO FORMULATE AND STATE A LITERAL MAIN IDEA IN THE READING OF SHORT, SPECIALLY CONSTRUCTED PARAGRAPHS IS REPORTED. ONE OF THE MAJOR TASKS WAS TO DEVELOP A DESCRIPTIVE PROFILE OF THE MAIN IDEA RESPONSES FOR A GROUP OF 400 SECOND- AND FIFTH-GRADE PUPILS. A 12-POINT SCALE WAS USED FOR THE NUMERICAL ORDERING…

This paper reports the results of a normative study of associations in the context of a simple declarative sentence in a manner that makes possible the estimation of sequential word-to-word dependencies within sentences. The subjects were 60 male and 60 female undergraduate students from educational psychology classes. However, data for males and…