Most children who are congenitally deafblind are severely delayed in their communication development and many will not achieve symbolic understanding and expression. This article discusses developmental markers cited in the research literature as predictive of or facilitative of the development of symbolism. These markers include the growth toward…

Examines whether three-month-old infants can detect variations within the single expression category of smiling and whether individual differences in infants' sensitivities are related to identifiable mother or infant behaviors. (HOD)

Reports the results of a high-speed search task administered to overactive and distractible (hyperactives), normoactive and distractible, and normoactive and attentive (controls) children. Instructions emphasized speed, accuracy, or both speed and accuracy. Indicates that controls and distractibles conformed to the fast guess model, which relates…

Investigates the additive memory effect of two modes of presenting information to elementary children on the retention of both images and words. Children represented more information in pictorial than in verbal form. The visual-verbal treatment group scored higher on most of both verbal and pictorial responses than the visual treatment group.…

Sixteen sixth and seventh grade students with language disorders were taught 20 vocabulary items by means of categorization and verbal rehearsal, with half of the students encouraged to use a visual imagery learning strategy. Results suggest that visual imagery may enhance verbal encoding strategies. (Author/DB)

This research compared the effects of a televised presentation and a picture book on children's recall of specific verbal and visual content using 48 third-grade students in Florida as subjects. The children were first stratified by sex and then randomly assigned to view the same story in either a picture book with audiotape or a televised…

This study examined whether the sources of information children use to substantiate story-based inferences are influenced by the medium of delivery. The 48 third grade students who acted as subjects were stratified by sex and randomly assigned to one of two media conditions; i.e., each child was presented an African folktale either (1) as a…

The interactions of three factors that may be involved with the memory for pattern or sequence in visual materials were investigated in this study: (1) arbitrariness of representation; (2) task; and (3) ability of students. The subjects, who were 29 graduate students in education, were pretested for general ability and randomly assigned to four…

Examines modality differences in preschoolers' ability to recognize or recall temporally related events and extends Ward and Wackman's model by evaluating whether the assumed "visual viewing style" applies to preschoolers' processing of temporal relations. Results demonstrated that temporally related events were remembered more…

Current issues in educational communications and technology are addressed in this collection of 48 papers, in which research reports predominate. Topics discussed include factors related to the learner, e.g., field dependence/independence, learning strategies, information processing, spatial ability, cognitive style, and cognitive strategies.…

Using seven trainable mentally-retarded students, aged 10-19, the study assessed the efficacy of an action mnemonic procedure for teaching letter-sound correspondences. The subjects were successfully trained to emit appropriate action-sounds in the presence of pictures incorporating the target letter, with picture-prompts being gradually faded to…

Varied conditions under which children aged four to five years matched the area of a rectangle with a given width or height to that of a square. Subjects matched one dimension of the rectangle to one side of the square suggesting that area matches seemed to be based on a side-matching strategy. (Author/AS)

Investigates developmental changes in the accuracy of aimed movements made to an illuminated target lamp by children between the ages of 1.5 and 8 years. Shows accuracy decreased with decreasing availability of visual information and improved with age under all conditions. (HOD)

This investigation into the information processing strategies of 12 profoundly/prelingually deaf college students found that subjects with oral/manual educational backgrounds had higher levels of recognition than did subjects from oral-only educational backgrounds. Highest recognition was to the left and right of the fixation point, followed by…

This study investigated potential effects of auditory and other communicative experience on development of visual attention in 80 infants (tested at 9, 12, and 18 months), half deaf and half with deaf mothers. Results indicate that early visual attention is associated with and potentially influenced by a complex interaction of maturation,…