Three experiments investigated listeners' ability to detect disfluency in spontaneous speech. All three employed gated word recognition with judgments of disfluency for spontaneous utterances containing disfluencies and for three kinds of fluent control utterances from the same six speakers. (Author/JL)

Stimulus preference assessments for individuals with developmental disabilities typically involve offering choices among stimuli and providing immediate access to the chosen stimuli. Several researchers have explored the utility of presenting choices verbally, thereby obviating the need to present the choices in tangible form and deliver access to…

In the growing interest in the role of attention and awareness in SLA, researchers have employed various introspective measures to uncover cognitive processes underlying SLA. This paper explores the use of a recall technique known as immediate retrospective verbal reports as a qualitative measure of noticing during oral interaction in SLA (compare…

Examinations of interference between verbal and visual materials in working memory have produced mixed results. If there is a central form of storage (e.g., the focus of attention; N. Cowan, 2001), then cross-domain interference should be obtained. The authors examined this question with a visual-array comparison task (S. J. Luck & E. K. Vogel,…

Correspondence training involves modification of nonverbal behavior via changes in verbal behavior. The procedure has a long history of effectiveness with a wide range of learners, but its potential for use with young children with disabilities remains largely unrealized. In an effort to identify the most appropriate applications of correspondence…

During the first year of life, infants' perception of speech becomes tuned to the phonology of the native language, as revealed in laboratory discrimination and categorization tasks using syllable stimuli. However, the implications of these results for the development of the early vocabulary remain controversial, with some results suggesting that…

Anecdotal reports provide evidence of so called "hybrid" gesturer whose non-verbal behavior of one language/culture becomes visible in the other. The direction of this gestural transfer seems to occur from a high to a low frequency gesture language. The purpose of this study was therefore to test systematically 1) whether gestural transfer occurs…

This article contends that the modern descendant of B. F. Skinner's experimental analysis of behavior, "behavior analysis," and as well his 1957 masterwork "Verbal Behavior," have rarely if ever been seriously contemplated by applied linguists for possible contributions to the field. Rather, a pat literature of dismissal has developed that…

Two variations of a vocal paired-stimulus preference assessment were evaluated to determine whether the verbal reports of preference, given by individuals with developmental disabilities when no access to the activity was given, matched their verbal reports when access to the activity was given contingent on their choice. The results indicated…

A study of children's and young adults' retention of words and their presentation modality addressed three issues: (1) how long the modality information is retained, (2) whether children or adults lose it more rapidly, and (3) whether the word or modality information is lost more rapidly. The study consisted of two experiments. In the first, 32…

Ninety-five children in 28 nursery school classrooms were used to investigate the relationships between teacher facilitative or directive verbal behavior in nursery school classrooms and seven aspects of child language change (receptive vocabulary, vocabulary of use, mean length of response, complexity of sentences, inquiry statements, dramatic…

This paper considers ways in which the organization of text can be made explicit through verbal cuing and the ways in which this organization can be related to the cognitive processes of the reader. It is noted that the textual factors supplementary to the main content play an important part in the comprehension of text and are, thus, important…

Memory for sex of the speaker and language of presentation of a spoken message was high and reliably better when the features were instrumental for comprehending the message than when they were not. This suggests that the physical characteristics of an event may be deeply or elaborately encoded when they are meaningful in light of the task…

A short-term memory task was used to explore the effects of verbal labeling and rehearsal on serial-position recall in mildly retarded 9-to 11-year-old children. Results support the view that verbal skills affect recall in mildly retarded children similarly to normal children. (Author/SDH)

The hypothesis that reading difficulty of learning disabled (LD) children is attributable to deficiencies in verbal encoding was investigated with 60 LD and normal children (mean CA=9.1, mean IQ=103.5). Ss were compared on recall of a serial short-term memory task after pre-training of named and unnamed stimulus conditions. Data suggested that…