Three conjunctive concept-learning problems were presented to 70 educable mentally retarded (EMR) children (9 to 14 years old) and 76 controls (7 to 10 years old) to assess the effects of four verbalization conditions and the presence or absence of a memory aid on concept attainment. Verbalization conditions were the following. (1) no…

This paper reports three experiments concerning methodological issues in studies on incidental learning performance which use verbal and nonverbal procedures and which appear to be hampered by differences in stimulus materials, learning opportunities, and dependent measures. The first study, using 128 children from grades 3, 5, 7, and 9, attempted…

An experiment is reported involving the teaching of the agreement of the past participle without an auxiliary verb, with "avoir" and with "etre," patterned after the studies of S. Roller in 1952-53 in this area. The initial experimentation is updated and involves the use of a Skinnerian model of programed instruction. The objectives, operational…

To collect word association norms, 100 educable mentally handicapped boys (chronological ages 11 to 16, mental ages 7 to 11.5) responded to 25 nouns from the Mein and O'Connor list of words most commonly used by retarded children. The subjects were individually tested by stimuli typed on cards. The responses of all 100 subjects to the 25 stimulus…

This study tested the possibility of using the optimization techniques of the response surface model in maximizing the response to a concept learning task. A secondary purpose was the investigation of the extent to which findings from concept learning experiments in laboratory settings would generalize to the learning of types of concepts…

According to the cognitive-congruency principle, humor appreciation peaks when the cognitive demands of the stimulus are congruent with the cognitive level of the child. This study tested the principle with jokes based on concepts associated with concrete operational thinking, conservation of mass and weight. This method provides a satisfactory…

Two experiments were done with a 16-year-old severely retarded male, involving the training of generalized instruction-following responses to preposition-noun combinations. (Author/DLS)

College students learned implicitly the underlying structure of an artificial language by memorizing a set of representative examples. The form and structure of their knowledge was evaluated and analyzed by: (1) solving anagrams; (2) determining well-formedness of novel letter strings; and (3) providing detailed introspective reports. (Author/MV)

Both technical health words and common health words produce communication blockages in college sex education classes. (MM)

This research tested Paivio's (1971) proposal that pictorial and verbal memory codes interact with space and time. This "interaction hypothesis" states that pictorial memory codes are specialized for spatial structures and verbal memory codes are specialized for temporal structures. Tests this hypothesis by exploring several variations…

Thirty-three impulsive learning-disabled males, aged 9-12 years were involved in the study to investigate techniques for reducing impulsive cognitive tempo. (Author)

A study is presented which supports the contention that planned exposure to a greater number of stimuli will affect achievement of seven-, eight-, and nine-year-olds. (MN)

Studies the processing of pictures and words as symbols. Shows that the superiority of pictures results from the fact that pictures are interpreted more quickly than words, but that after the interpretation is made, processing is the same. Also gives evidence that pictures and words are both processed in terms of linguistic codes rather than…

Vocal and object-directed behaviors of parents and infants were examined according to the social-construction view of development. Interactions of 66 infant-parent dyads were observed. Normative changes and stability of individual differences of joint-action variables and the relation of these variables to 30-month cognitive-development status…

Thirty normal geriatric individuals, who had been randomly assigned to one of three feedback modes, were instructed to produce a phrase at slow, average, and fast speaking rates. Results suggest that visual-verbal and verbal-quantitative feedback lead to significantly better performance than verbal-qualitative feedback, particularly when the task…