This preliminary study examined effects of word visibility and prime association factors on visual spoken word recognition in lipreading, using a related/unrelated prime-target paradigm with 20 hearing adults. In related prime-target pairings, more targets with a high than low prime association were identified. In unrelated prime-target pairings,…

Three experiments examined whether limitations in perceptual ability by 24 individuals with mental retardation extended to learning perceptual categories based on elements of actions. Individuals with mental retardation had difficulty identifying some actions, slower decision times for activity identification, and could not identify the actor's…

The sensitivity of 10 moderately mentally retarded and 10 nonretarded adults to changes in environmental spatial structure with and without visual-environmental clues was examined. Both groups showed similar sensitivity to perspective changes without visual cues, but only the nonretarded demonstrated increased accuracy with the visual cues.…

This study compared visual word recognition (speechreading) in video sequences showing either full face or lips plus mandible to 26 normal hearing college students and 4 adults with bilateral sensorineural hearing loss. Percent phoneme correct scores were similar in the two conditions and scores significantly improved for the repeated measure in…

A series of three experiments was conducted to assess the comprehension of four types of cross-modal (synesthetic) similarities in children and adults. Both perceptual and verbal (metaphoric) modes were tested. (PCB)

Visual discrimination and motor reproduction tasks involving computer-simulated arm movements were administered to 12 adults with mental retardation and a gender-matched control group. The purpose was to examine whether inadequacies in visual perception account for the poorer motor performance of this population. Results indicate both perceptual…

This study examined whether 49 adults with mild or moderate mental retardation could perform reliably enough on the Penn Facial Discrimination Task to make this a useful research measure for evaluating visual-receptive processing. Results found subjects generally performed well above chance level, that retest reliability was reasonably high, and…

This report documents a computer-based gaming system for assessing recognition performance (RECOG). The game management system is programmed in a modular manner to: instruct the student on how to play the game, retrieve and display individual images, keep track of how well individuals play and provide them feedback, and link these components by…

Presents four experiments comparing the perceptual span in second-, fourth-, and sixth-grade readers and skilled adult readers. Suggests that the size of perceptual span is variable and influenced by text difficulty. Concludes that the size of perceptual span does not cause slow reading rates in beginning readers. (Author/DR)

Examines how children's responses to questions about object terms varied across objects and the degree to which children specified common and conventional values for different object dimensions. (HOD)

Reports on three experiments that investigated why young children's perceptions of bimodal speech are less influenced by the visual component of speech than adults' perceptions are. Results argue in favor of the explanation that children are poorer lipreaders than adults. (HOD)

The effectiveness of training procedures which used visual-visual arbitrary matching, blocked-trial matching-to-sample, and successive discrimination training to teach visual-visual discrimination of two-dimensional forms was evaluated with two men having severe mental retardation. Results indicated that the procedures did establish conditional…

The sentence processing abilities of a conduction aphasic adult woman with a documented phonological coding deficit were investigated in tests of auditory and visual sentence comprehension of reversible active and passive sentences and spatial prepositions, sentence production through story completion and picture description, and repetition of…

A developmental study investigated the pictorial and linguistic main idea identification skills of 104 students in second, fifth, and eighth grades. In the pictorial task, the subjects studied a complete picture story and ranked the effectiveness of four separate main idea alternatives at capturing the meaning of the story. Following the same…

Nine adults with Prader-Willi syndrome (PWS) and nine age- and IQ-matched adults with PWS completed standardized tests of long-term and short-term memory, visual and auditory processing, and reading and mathematics achievement. Contrary to previous findings, long-term memory in PWS subjects was strong relative to IQ and there was no evidence that…