Background: The relation between physical activity (PA), motor skills and cognitive function in children is receiving considerable attention. To transition scientific evidence into pedagogical practice, however, we need to further our understanding of which qualitative PA characteristics are best suited to stimulate motor skills and executive…

Purpose: The goal of this study was to provide guidance to clinicians on early benchmarks of successful word learning in an interactive book reading treatment and to examine how encoding and memory evolution during treatment contribute to word learning outcomes by kindergarten children with specific language impairment (SLI). Method: Twenty-seven…

The aim of the present study was to investigate the effect of the "Visual Awareness Education Programme" developed to support the visual literacy skills of preschool children. The study group comprised 40 children (20 children in the experimental group and 20 children in the control group) attending preschool in the 2014-2015 school…

An adapted alternating treatments design was used to compare the expressive use of thematic vocabulary by three preschool children with developmental delays during Dialogic Reading, a shared book reading intervention, and Activity-Based Intervention, a naturalistic play-based teaching method. The design was replicated across two early childhood…

Giving names for pictures of familiar objects to nursery school children improves their later recognition of those pictures. This improvement occurs even though the children can easily name the pictures when asked. The present research eliminated the sufficiency of several possible explanations. The names might have provided a response to rehearse…

Forty preschoolers were directed to mentally rotate a stimulus and to discriminate the rotated stimulus from among a set of alternatives. Results are discussed in light of discrepant findings about children's kinetic imagery ability and the advisability of using this particular paradigm with young children. (Author/BS)

Examined reversal of emergent simple discriminations through stimulus contiguity. In experiment one, Baseline and Reversal phases were positive for most children. Experiments two through four examined protocol aspects that possibly contributed to successful reversal of the form discrimination; found that reversed discrimination usually was a…

A 112-item Multi-Modal Articulation Analysis test was administered to 116 Head Start children ranging in age from 4 years, 6 months to 5 years, 5 months. The test involves presenting to the subject an object, or representation thereof, requiring a one-word response. Four modes of stimulus presentation were used: (1) actual objects, (2) black and…

This paper reports two studies which compared scores obtained on the Slosson Intelligence Test (SIT) and Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT) and investigated the hypothesis that the representational level of the stimulus items in the PPVT is inappropriate for preschool children regardless of socioeconomic background. In the first study, the…

Hypothesis was confirmed that more familiar and more ambiguous concepts would be less readily named in their less detailed representations. (Author/MB)

This study reports an attempt to improve the administration of the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT) by identifying and modifying aspects of the test which adversely affect disadvantaged preschoolers' performance. The resultant test was called the Modified Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (M-PPVT). Two samples from the same lower class…

In response to the pressing needs to develop a culture-fair, nonverbal readiness test for rural and urban disadvantaged preschool children, a special project was undertaken. PREP kit no. 22 was adapted from the final report of a project conducted by Dr. Wanda Walker, Northwest Missouri State College, Maryville, and supported by the Office of…

Speech-delayed preschool children's (N=21) responses to booklet-presented pictures (Photo Articulation Test) were compared to similar microcomputer-presented graphics with a variety of screen formats. (CB)

A subsidiary purpose of this study was to initially explore the value of visual representations of family life as tools to improve the family perceptions of preschool disadvantaged children. (Authors)