Four experiments studied effects of difficulty of word identification on optional conceptual processing by second, third, and fifth graders, and college students in a cued recall task. Results indicated that contrastive processing facilitates recall, and that difficulty of word identification may limit the extent of optional contrastive…

Preschoolers; second, fourth, and sixth graders; and university students were asked to interpret videotapes in which an actor conveyed contradictory verbal and facial expressions with and without a story context that provided a reason for the contradiction. Findings revealed age and context effects. (RH)

Notes that children are "wired" to learn, and cites research indicating the importance of talking to an infant for his or her neuron and subsequent cognitive development. Suggests reading aloud, providing positive feedback, responding verbally to the child's actions, and increasing vocabulary. (HTH)

We examined the role of specific therapist verbal behaviors in predicting successful completion of Parent?Child Interaction Therapy (PCIT) in 22 families, including 11 families that successfully completed treatment and 11 that discontinued treatment prematurely. The children were 3 to 6 years old and diagnosed with oppositional defiant disorder…

We report the case of a neonate tested three weeks after a neonatal left sylvian infarct. We studied her perception of speech and non-speech stimuli with high-density event-related potentials. The results show that she was able to discriminate not only a change of timbre in tones but also a vowel change, and even a place of articulation contrast…

The interaction between prosodic and segmental aspects of infant representations for speech was explored using the head-turn paradigm, with untrained everyday familiar words and phrases as stimuli. At 11 months English-learning infants, like French infants (Halle & Boysson-Bardies, 1994), attended significantly longer to a list of familiar lexical…

A novel attentional capture effect is reported in which visual-verbal serial recall was disrupted if a single deviation in the interstimulus interval occurred within otherwise regularly presented task-irrelevant spoken items. The degree of disruption was the same whether the temporal deviant was embedded in a sequence made up of a repeating item…

We tested the effects of multiple exemplar instruction (MEI) on the emergence of untaught mands or tacts of adjective-object pairs in a multiple-probe design across four students with autism/developmental disabilities. None of the students emitted either mands or tacts for three sets of three adjective-object pairs (word sets counterbalanced…

Four experiments investigated activation of semantic information in action preparation. Participants either prepared to grasp and use an object (e.g., to drink from a cup) or to lift a finger in association with the object's position following a go/no-go lexical-decision task. Word stimuli were consistent to the action goals of the object use…

Two studies were conducted to train students to use imagery in their learning and to investigate whether such training would transfer to solving visual puzzles and verbal problems. In the first study, with 78 graduate students, 29 experimental-group subjects were given a lecture and slide presentation designed to teach about imagery. Both the…

The interaction of reading ability with serial position indicates that short-term storage is equally robust for dyslexics and normals but that long-term storage is impaired for dyslexics. (Author/BJG)

Based on a dissertation, School of Education, University of Virginia.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the television production components and to suggest the research hypotheses and designs that will yield a more systematic exploration of the importance of the use of facial closeups in television interviews. The first part of the paper discusses three potential factors that may influence a viewer's judgment…

The usefulness of intact (topic outline format) and embedded (positioned within text) headings as processing aids to facilitate recall was examined, using a 2,500-word passage from introductory science textbooks. Prior studies were subject to criticisms which this study attempted to correct, specifically: (1) use of non-optimal dependent measures;…

THE PURPOSE OF THIS RESEARCH WAS TO EXAMINE THE EFFECTS OF SEVERAL MEASURES OF WORD-RELATEDNESS ON SEVERAL VERBAL LEARNING TASKS--PRIMARILY PAIRED-ASSOCIATES LEARNING AND VERBAL DISCRIMINATION LEARNING, WITH INCIDENTAL ATTENTION GIVEN TO FREE RECALL AND SEMANTIC GENERALIZATION. THE STRATEGY WAS TO SELECT A SAMPLE OF WORD PAIRS (240 COMMON NOUNS…