On average, men outperform women on mental rotation tasks. Even boys as young as 4 1/2 perform better than girls on simplified spatial transformation tasks. The goal of our study was to explore ways of improving 5-year-olds' performance on a spatial transformation task and to examine the strategies children use to solve this task. We found that…

The social underpinnings of learning make it important to understand how people experience themselves and form relationships in web-based educational environments. Social presence is a critical factor of a communication medium that plays an important role in building community and improving the effectiveness of instruction. The components of…

This case study reports on the progress of Navon, a 13-year-old boy with prelingual deafness, over a 3-month period following exposure to Logo, a computer programming language that visualizes specific programming commands by means of a virtual drawing tool called the Turtle. Despite an almost complete lack of skills in spoken and sign language,…

This article argues for the development of a framework through which to describe children's multimodal texts. Such a shared discourse should be capable of including different modes and media and the ways in which children integrate and combine them for their own meaning-making purposes. It should also acknowledge that multimodal texts are not…

Group social structure provides a comfortable and predictable context for interaction in learning environments. Students in face-to-face learning environments process social information about others in order to assess traits, predict behaviors, and determine qualifications for assuming particular responsibilities within a group. In online learning…

A survey of images on gravestones yields a fascinating array of symbols and visual communication. This paper describes a project in which over 300 symbols in graveyards of the southeastern United States were examined. The method of recording the images and information about them was to photograph the symbol with a 35mm single lens reflex (SLR) and…

Concludes that nonverbal communication and modality of presentation (audio, audio-visual, visual) have a significant effect on perception of leadership. (RB)

Described the methodological problems in setting up a kinesic inventory. Concludes that it is highly unrealistic to study language by itself without analyzing the formal and semantic make-up of the triple basic structure of language-paralanguage-kinesics. (Text is in Spanish.) (DS)

Semiotics addresses the question of how people derive meaning from a text, and meaning stems from considering phenomena as signs and from looking at the relationships among these signs. Thus, a semiological analysis of the television series "Cheers" reveals that the title suggests happiness, good spirits, and companionship. The show…

The book describes techniques for helping nonspeaking individuals to communicate. The first section focuses on equipment, presenting information on materials and instructions for constructing such equipment as communication boards for children who need a looking response; boards or trays for children with motor control problems; brief-case-style…

Four developmental outcomes of children's play were identified as acquaintance with the environment and the development of cognitive activity, verification of incidental learning, the development through sensory and motoric activities of relationships with objects and persons, and experience with roles and rules. A child developing atypically may…

This study examined the effects of four levels of nonverbal facial gestures on client verbal behavior in a quasi-interview setting. Results indicated that subjects produced significantly greater amounts of feeling when stimuli were presented by the female experimenter as opposed to the male experimenter. (Author)

Concluded that adolescents with learning disabilities exhibited quantitative and qualitative reductions in the recognition of affective cues which related to visual-motor organization. (RB)

This annotated, selected bibliography of 21 monographs and articles on non-verbal communication is designed to help library personnel develop their perceptions of body language, thereby helping them respond more appropriately to user queries. Introductory material includes a brief literature review. (MBR)

Examines the use of nonverbal communication between males and females and counselors and noncounselors, and reports on differences in their ability to read nonverbal cues. (Author)